Life under Jim Crow
QUESTION
Was Jim Crow (after whom US racial segregation laws were named) a real person? THE term Jim Crow was given to the repressive laws used to restrict black rights from the 1890s, but the origin of the name dates back to before the US Civil War of 18611865. Thomas Dartmouth ‘Daddy’ Rice was the most popular minstrel act of the 1830s and 1840s. A white man, he played Jim Crow, a caricature of a dim-witted black slave. Rice blacked his face and affected a distorted imitation of African American speech. He claimed to have created the character after witnessing an elderly black man singing the song Jump Jim Crow in Louisville, Kentucky.
This song, which Rice performed, included the refrain: ‘Weel about and turn about and do ‘jis so, eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.’ Rice’s act was popular in the US, and Jim Crow became a common stage persona for white minstrels. Following the US Civil War, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau in an attempt to help former slaves, but several Southern states enacted black codes to curb their rights. Jim Crow’s name was invoked as the blanket term for a wave of anti-black laws.
These restricted the civil rights of black Americans. Public places were segregated and intimidation eroded personal freedom. The segregationist philosophy of ‘separate but equal’ was backed in law by the notorious 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy vs Ferguson, in which it was ruled that the state of Louisiana had the right to require different railroad cars for blacks and whites. The Jim Crow laws weren’t revoked until the 1954 Supreme Court Case of Brown vs Board of Education, but its legacy has endured to this day. Martin Leapington, Suffolk.
QUESTION
Who discovered the cure for leprosy? How common is the disease today? LEPROSY is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the skin, mucous membranes and nerves, causing discoloration and lumps on the skin and, in severe cases, deformities. The word leprosy comes from the Ancient Greek word lepra, meaning scaly.
Through the efforts of the World Health Organisation, leprosy has declined from five million cases in the 1980s to 230,000 cases today in India (59%), Brazil (14%) and Indonesia (8%). Leprosy first appeared in Europe in the 4th century BC following Alexander the Great’s expeditions to India.
For centuries leprosy was thought to be a hereditary disease, a curse, or a punishment from God. Sufferers were stigmatised and shunned. In Europe during the Middle Ages, lepers had to wear special clothing and ring bells to warn others they were close by.
In 1873, the Norwegian Dr Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen discovered mycobacterium leprae, the bacteria that causes leprosy. Until the late 1940s, doctors treated patients by injecting them with oil from the chaulmoogra nut, a painful treatment that was rarely successful. The first successful treatment was developed through drug trials on the island of Malta in 1972 led by Professor E. Freerksen. Patients were given a combination of three antibiotics: dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine. Treatment lasts from six months to a year or more, depending on the strength of the leprosy infection. Since 1981, the WHO has offered this multi-drug treatment free, which has resulted in a sharp decline in the number of sufferers.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge. ...TODAY, leprosy is treated with a combination of drugs: clofazimine, dapsone and rifampicin. Clofazimine was developed by Cork-born scientist Vincent Barry (19081975). Dr Barry was educated at UCD and worked with the Medical Research Council.
He was tasked with researching various treatments of tuberculosis. As that disease became more manageable, Dr Barry turned his attention to leprosy and built on the work of Norwegian scientist Dr Hansen who had discovered the bacterial origin of leprosy.
Dr Barry realised that there were similarities between the bacteria that caused both TB and leprosy, and he started to look at how his research could be applied to leprosy. Dr Barry travelled to India and Zimbabwe, visiting a leper colony that was founded by another Irishman, Wellesley Bailey in the 1870s. In Dublin, at a lab at Trinity College, Dr Barry and his team developed clofazimine, which was introduced as part of a multi-drug treatment in 1981.
Ann Dunne, by email.
QUESTION
Was the word ‘quiz’ created to satisfy a bet? THE story goes that in 1793, Dublin theatre proprietor Richard Daly made a bet that within 48 hours, he could create a nonsense word that would become known throughout the city and the public would supply a meaning for it.
After a performance one evening, he gave his staff cards with the word ‘quiz’ written on them and told them to write the word on walls around the city. The next day the strange new word was the talk of the town, and soon became part of the language.
There’s a number of reasons to doubt this story. For one, it appeared in print in 1835 in The London And Paris Observer 44 years after the event supposedly took place. Furthermore, there is evidence that the word was in use, albeit with a different meaning, before Daly’s prank. The London Magazine of 1783 carried the definition: ‘A quiz signifies one who thinks, speaks or acts differently from the rest of the world in general.’
An article in the Sporting Magazine in 1794 said that to call someone a quiz could insultingly imply they were pedantic: ‘Now every young man who wishes to attain that for which he was sent by his friends to the university, namely improvement, is immediately denominated a quiz, and is subject to the petty insults.’
This explains why the respectable residents of Dublin might have taken issue with Daly’s appeal to have this word written all over its walls. The use of quiz in the sense to interrogate emerged in the 19th century. Its origin is uncertain, but the Oxford English Dictionary speculates it might be derived from the word ‘inquisitive’, having derived from the Latin inquirire, meaning to inquire.