attempts to drown themselves only, but are equally given to hanging, the constant thing about all their attempts being a lack of enthusiasm about getting the thing definitely done: the patient seems to potter at it, not much caring whether he does successfully hang or drown himself or no, but just keeps on, as if he could not help doing it. This has probably given rise to the native method of treating this disease—namely, holding a meeting of the patient's responsible relations, who point out elaborately to him the advantages of life over death, and enquire of him his reasons for hankering after the latter. If in spite of these representations he persists in a course of habitual suicide, he is knocked on the head and thrown into the river; for it is a nuisance to have a person about who is continually hanging himself to the house ridge pole and pulling the roof half off, or requiring a course of sensational rescues from drowning.
The sleep disease[1] is also a strange thing. When I first arrived in Africa in 1893 there had just been a dreadful epidemic of it in the Kakongo and lower Congo region, and I saw a good many cases, and became much interested in it, and have ever since been trying to gather further information regarding it.
Dr. Patrick Manson in his important paper[2] states that it has never been known to affect any one who has not at one time or another been resident within this area, and
- ↑ Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno; Nelavane (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).
- ↑ System of Medicine. Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford Allbutt. Macmillan & Co., 1897.
face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says that turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in breaking up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes is with us.
