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Editorial
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Writing in The Naval Surgeon (1734), John Atkins (1685–1757) noted that natives in western Africa are prone to a ‘sleeping distemper’, usually fatal, and resulting at best in an irresistible tendency to sleep such that survivors ‘lose the little reason they have and turn idiots’. As Roy Porter explains in The greatest benefit to mankind (1997), HM (Henry) Stanley's success as economic development director to King Leopold II flushed this disease into the central areas, and missionaries conveying the sick to mission stations inadvertently triggered infection of previously uninfected zones such that fatalities soared and the horrors of sleeping sickness seized the public imagination. In Missionary travels and researches in South Africa (1857), David Livingstone gave an account of the tsetse fly and of the disease of livestock resulting from its bite; in line with the ubiquitous approach to most diseases presumed to be infective, he treated ‘nagana’ in horses
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