When Sleep Is Sickness
Scolten, Adrian
August 28, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 423 canoes paddled by Indians. All day long they go sheltered by the small roof of dry palm that covers the centre of the native canoe. At night they stop at...
...They would grow The way they did a thousand years ago...
...At night they stop at a small dry palm hut, built on spikes planted in the mud along the river bank...
...Because there is inadequate provision for study and hospitalization of such cases, and because the mental aberration is not serious enough to class them as insane, these people float about, a burden to themselves, their families and associates...
...The ceremony ends with the confirmation of those who are prepared to receive the sacrament...
...Should not social and mental welfare workers search for a means of lessening the untold misery which it causes...
...They weave A tapestry of vines and throw it over The fences that are near...
...In an investigation made in Germany by Hess, it was found that every patient examined from one to two years after the initial attack still had serious physical and nervous disorders...
...It is confined to no country and has spread over the world like the biblical plagues...
...All day long they go sheltered by the small roof of dry palm that covers the centre of the native canoe...
...It is a disease which is disconcerting, disabling and pauperizing...
...Because these residual effects are of such long duration, the number of individuals incapacitated by the disease increases each year...
...Possession The fields resent intrusion...
...Because no special facilities have been provided for the care of these unfortunates, many of them are confined in reform schools...
...The entire Indian family greets their prelate with respect and love--native Amazonians are pious...
...This disease, perhaps better known as sleeping sickness, has a high death rate, is probably contagious and carries serious after-effects...
...But it is not so...
...Here conditions are anything but conducive to improvement...
...With the last rays of sunlight, all hang their hammocks under the roof--the bishop's among his hosts...
...August 28, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 423 canoes paddled by Indians...
...They radiate a peace, a serenity, the spell of which one cannot cast aside once one has absorbed it...
...Many others have never been recognized, for the disease presents most variegated symptoms...
...By the time the bishop has put on his vestments, the neighbors of the forest have gathered...
...Unless one happens to be a member of the family in which epidemic encephalitis has found a victim, it is not likely that his attention has been brought to the inadequacy of the means available in our public institutions for the care and study of these cases...
...I cannot end without disciosing my bishop's one temporal wish: it is to have one flight in an airplane l For Saint Michael, the great archangel who had wings to fly with, is his patron saint, and Monsenhor would like to borrow those wings for one day...
...These sleeping sickness cases in the past have involved only a small portion of the population, and many were not recognized until they had already become chronic...
...The state which establishes a means whereby the victims of sleeping sickness could be cared for over a length of time sufficient to study the disease and help the patient, will take first place in the fight against a tremendous and baffling problem...
...Many of the behavior disorders which have amazed and shocked the public mind in children of good mentality and apparently good home training, can be traced to attacks of acute epidemic encephalitis...
...When you leave A wagon rut they fill it full of clover And buttercups and Queen Anne's lace...
...The fields resent intrusion...
...He marries the young couples, baptizes the children and hears confession...
...If some state gives adequate attention to the disease, other states will surely follow...
...It is those personal gifts--the magnetism of the man blended with the consoling teachings of the Church he upholds--that gain him the respect and love of his humble flock as well as of those in power...
...They are, too often, without sympathetic understanding, have no hope for the future, and end in despair and sometimes suicide...
...Yet they scheme-Forever crafty, eager to regain Some old abandoned garden or redeem The winding beauty of a country lane...
...At sunrise all are up and they bathe in the rio-for Amazonians bathe at least twice a day...
...The mato is as eternal--it seems--as are his faith, his hope and his charity...
...At the present time there are in the United...
...hardly anyone Would think a meadow restless...
...The post-mortem table, however, should not be the best diagnostic table...
...Many may think that one of refined tastes, of culture, of aristocratic bearing, as is the bishop of Teff6, is wasting his gifts among the Indians...
...A meadow looks So lazy as it stretches in the sun, So peaceful with its grazing cows, its brooks, Its languid willows...
...Many adults likewise suffer prolonged disability and peculiarities in behavior following an attack...
...WHEN SLEEP IS SICKNESS By ADRIAN SCOLTEN N THE state of Wisconsin there are, at the present time, over eight hundred cases of epidemic encephalitis...
...Then he celebrates mass amid the mato, his holy stone set on a crude plank or table, and everyone receives Holy Communion--which they have, perhaps, not done for a year or more...
...He is now praying each day that I may sometime come back to the Amazon in a large seaplane, and land on Teff6 lake to give him his wish...
...It comes through nobody's fault, as insidiously as a cold or the influenza and doubtless by the same portal of entry...
...I do not think a different sort of man could have accomplished the things that Monsenhor Barrat has accomplished...
...GERTRUDE RYDER BENNETT...
...To many victims it is, in truth, a "living death...
...They serve dinner of fish and farinha on the wooden platform in front of the house, amid gnats and mosquitoes...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
