Medicine: Sleeping Sickness Heroes

Raymond Alexander Kelser, Army Medical School bacteriologist, reported recently in Science that the yellow fever mosquito apparently transmits human sleeping sickness to rabbits. Last week his associate, Dr. James Stevens Simmons was in St. Louis with yellow fever mosquitoes and monkeys to try to find out how St. Louis’ sleeping sickness epidemic spreads. Impatient with the slowness of animal experiment three volunteers, heroic but anonymous, let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes which had bitten encephalitis victims. As unpredictable as their infection by the bites is their recovery.