The speech of the English socialist Quelch at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart had an excellent effect. It prevented the outbreak of sleeping sickness among the members of the Hague Peace Conference.
(Der wahre Jacob, Berlin, 1907)
(Harry Quelch was famously expelled from Germany for referring to the Hague Peace Conference as a “thieves’ supper.”)
“Here we bring this individual that we found him sound asleep on the street.”
“Asleep? It is surely a case of encephalitis.”
“And it wouldn’t be a colossal drunk, would it?”
(El Mentidero, Madrid, 1920)
“She’s been sleeping for two days, Doctor, and we can’t wake her. So we’re afraid she’s got the sleeping sickness.”
“Has she been going dancing?”
“Every night until morning.”
“Then leave her alone and give me thirty crowns…!”
(Humoristické listy, Prague, 1924)
“At the end of a hundred years, the king’s son came to wake her up.”
“Darn! It’s like she had sleeping sickness!”
(Le Rire, Paris, 1920) (reproduced in Caras y Caretas)
Cutting a continent out from under him.
(Puck, New York, 1911) (The cheapest of colonialist metaphors, and marginal to this archive’s concerns, but let us preserve it nonetheless.)
“I am so glad to see you again, dear Bertha!… When will you get married, where are you going for your honeymoon?”
“My bridegroom is still wavering. You know he’s an avid bacteriologist. We are going either to East Asia or to Africa. He can just as well study plague in Mukden or sleeping sickness in the Congo… Which would you prefer?”
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1911) (See also this French version.)
Main caption: A French man of culture has made the proposal to introduce bombs with plague bacteria as a new means of warfare. If this benevolent enterprise were to be realized, then the Central Powers will not be accountable for the reply.
(Kikeriki, Vienna, 1915)
The Italians can then prepare themselves for bombs with the pathogen of galloping consumption.
Bacteria which produce extra upper legs are intended for their sympathetic ruler.
For English listening posts bullets with the sleeping sickness pathogen are at the ready.
Epilepsy will be transmitted to English flyers.
The Foreign Legion soldiers so valued by the Parisian ladies world for their dark skin color will have to cease their heartbreaking activity soon, when we’ve given them bleaching on their necks.
Transmitting the English disease to the equine ranks of the Allies is child’s play.
It will be just as easy to spread the bacillus of Masurian dropsy in the Russian army.
The lovely d’Annunzio ought to be punished by a secret medicament until his hydrocephaly has attained a form that makes it impossible to wear a hat.
For the delightful Gaby Deslys-Navratil [an immensely popular French singer and silent film actor who would expire in 1920 from complications following a bout with Spanish flu], who has gotten into a bit of a spot from all the kissing, we have a means ready to develop a splendid trunk in a short time, so that she can spare her lovely 42 cm mouth during her grueling advertising service.
“Would you please hear me out… Voice?… The mayor’s certificate, the lady of the house in bed, with seven hungry children…”
“Impossible; the gentleman is currently suffering from ‘encephalitis lethargica’ [sometimes called sleeping sickness].”
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1920)
Doctor: “Don’t be alarmed. Your husband’s illness is not serious; however, you have to be very careful. Any disorder, a strong sensation, a violent emotion, can be fatal…”
(second panel) The emotion!
(La Risa, Madrid, 1922)
(Suffering patients include low rents, renovation works, the nationalist spirit of the league, frozen beef (?).)
“Indeed, all the manifestations, all the symptoms are of the ‘encephalitis lethargica’.”
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1920)
“The compensations aren’t that bad; the Congo Colony is indeed extremely valuable to us: you can send the socialists there if they get too lively, so that they get sleeping sickness!”
(Der wahre Jacob, Stuttgart, 1911)
Professor Koch has discovered an extremely effectively treatment against sleeping sickness. (Namely, loudly advertising his colonial researches.)
(Kikeriki, Vienna, 1907)
(In 1906 the famous German bacteriologist Robert Koch led a group of researchers to German East Africa in search of a cure for African sleeping sickness. Experimenting with a “magic bullet” of the sort his protégé Paul Ehrlich had developed in his laboratory, Koch and his associates treated thousands of patients with Atoxyl, an arsenic-based substance with toxic side effects. Though Koch remained convinced of its efficacy up to his death in 1910, this therapy proved to be his greatest failure.)
“Encephalitis might be a sufficient pretext for not paying your rent…”
(Le Rire, Paris, 1920)
At Kyffhäuser on the northern border of Thuringia in Germany lies a giant modern monument to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (“Barbarossa”), also the site of an ancient astronomical observatory. This image was published more or less at the height of the Second Reich’s modest colonial ventures in Africa.
“I miss the edginess in my dear old empire. It smells so much like Congo sleeping sickness.”
(Kladderadatsch, Berlin, 1911)
“I fooled myself again. Then you should trust the news.”
“What happened?”
“I read that the sleeping sickness is raging in Brno, I head there, I get into four apartments, but nobody was sleeping anywhere…”
(Humoristické listy, Prague, 1920)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 