Nothing to Crow about
QUESTION Was Jim Crow (after whom the U.S. 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 American Civil War, 1861 to 1865.
Minstrel shows were an American form of entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing and musical performances that mocked people of African descent.
Thomas Dartmouth ‘ Daddy’ Rice was the most popular minstrel act of the 1830s and 1840s. he wore make-up to play Jim Crow, a caricature of a slave, and affected an exaggerated and distorted imitation of African-American speech.
he claimed to have created the character after witnessing an elderly black man singing the traditional song Jump Jim Crow in Louisville, Kentucky.
It became Rice’s theme song and included the refrain: ‘Weel about and turn about and do ‘jis so, eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.’
his act was popular throughout the U.S. and he toured Britain, and Jim Crow became a common stage persona for minstrel acts.
Following the U.S. Civil War, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves, but Southern states enacted codes to curb their rights. Jim Crow’s name was invoked as the blanket term for this wave of anti-black laws.
Public places were segregated and there was widespread intimidation.
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 black and white people.
The Jim Crow laws weren’t revoked until the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board of education, but its legacy has endured to this day. Martin Leapington, Bury St Edmunds, 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 (such as the mouth and nasal passages) and nerves, causing discolouration and lumps on the skin, and, in severe cases, disfigurement and deformities.
The word leprosy comes from the Ancient Greek lepra, meaning scaly.
Through the efforts of the World health organisation ( Who), leprosy has declined from five million cases in the eighties to 230,000 today.
The majority of these cases are in India (59 per cent), Brazil (14 per cent) and Indonesia (8 per cent).
Leprosy first appeared in europe in the 4th century BC following Alexander the Great’s expeditions to India. It reached Rome in 62BC, with the return of Pompeii’s troops from Asia Minor.
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, ring bells to warn others they were close by and cry: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’
In 1873, Norwegian Dr Gerhard henrik Armauer hansen discovered Mycobacterium leprae, the bacteria that causes leprosy.
Until the late Forties, doctors treated patients by injecting them with oil from the chaulmoogra nut, which was painful and rarely worked.
The first successful treatment was developed through drug trials on the island of Malta in 1972 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.
Since 1981, the Who has offered this multi- drug treatment free of charge, which has resulted in a sharp decline in the number of sufferers.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Was the word ‘quiz’ created to win 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 this word on walls around the city.
The next day the strange new word was the talk of the town, and within a short time had become part of the language.
There are reasons to doubt this. The story appeared in The London And Paris observer in 1835 — 42 years after the event supposedly took place. And there is evidence the word was in use, with a different meaning, before Daly’s prank.
The London Magazine of 1783 carried the definition: ‘A quiz, in the common acceptation of the word, signifies one who thinks, speaks or acts differently from the rest of the world in general.’
An article in the Sporting Magazine in 1794 indicates that to call someone a quiz could imply they were pedantic and rulebound: ‘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 of every buck (a species of the human kind so called in Cambridge) he meets with.’
The use of quiz in the sense to question or 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.
D. E. Williams, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.
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