It is this terrible disease which has lately appeared on the shores of the Victoria Nyanza, in the kingdom of Uganda, administered by the British Government. Until the early part of the year 1901 there was not the slightest suspicion that sleeping sickness occurred in any part of the Uganda Protectorate; nor was it known in East Africa at all, any more than in the north and south of that great continent. It seems gradually to have crept up the newly opened trade-routes of the Congo basin, and thence to have spread into the west of Uganda, the territory known as Busoga. Numbers of Soudanese and Congo men are known to have settled in this region after the death of Emin Pasha. First noticed in 1901, it was estimated in June 1902, by the Commissioner of Uganda, writing officially to the Marquess of Lansdowne, that 20,000 persons had died of this disease in the district of Busoga alone, and several thousands in the more eastern portion of Uganda. At this moment it is probable that the number of deaths in this region due to sleeping sickness since 1901 amounts to more than 200,000; and this though, most fortunately, the disease has not yet spread eastward from Uganda into British East Africa,[23] nor, so far as has been reported, down the Nile. No curative treatment for the disease has yet been discovered; nor is there any authenticated instance of recovery. The appalling mortality produced by this disease in Central Africa naturally caused the greatest anxiety to his Majesty’s Government, which had but just completed the railway from the East Coast to the shores of lake Victoria Nyanza, and had established a prosperous and happy rule in that densely populated region. The official medical men on the spot, though capable and experienced practitioners, were unable to cope with this new and virulent outbreak. The Foreign Office, having no imperial board of hygiene and medical administration to apply to in this country, sought the assistance of the Royal Society of London.