Word: skins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Leopard Skin. Among the blacks there had sprung up a quasi-religious group called Abako, which Belgian newspapers brushed off as merely a tribal organization. Originally it had been formed by the Bakongo tribe of the south as a sort of protective union against the harder-working and more favored Bangalas. But under the leadership of a slight, timid-looking but steel-willed fanatic named Joseph Kasavubu, 41, it gradually turned its anger upon bigger targets...
...reviving the fabled 14th century kingdom of the Congo, combining territories now French, Belgian and Portuguese. After his election as one of Léopoldville's commune burgomasters in 1957, he had himself declared "Supreme Leader" by his followers, and began receiving homage seated on a leopard skin, symbol of tribal supreme power. Meanwhile, the rival Bangalas also began organizing, and the bush telegraph began to echo the nationalist sentiments of the recent All African Peoples Conference in Accra. To make matters worse, the demand for Congolese copper ore hit a slump, and jobless natives swarmed into the city...
Some people have skins so sensitive that it is possible to write on them with a fingernail or the smoothly curved end of a paper clip. This extreme sensitivity, called dermographia ("writing on the skin") is the usual explanation when patients complain that they are "allergic to everything," two Little Rock physicians reported in the A.M.A. Journal. Although the condition has been known for years, it is often overlooked and causes a lot of needless doctoring...
Patients of this type, say Allergists Thomas G. Johnston and Alan G. Cazort, react simply to pressure on the skin. When the allergist applies a patch containing a suspected cause of allergic reaction, the patient reacts all right-but to the pressure of the patch, not to the supposedly allergenic substance. In their practice the doctors found that many patients who say they are allergic to wool are actually irritated by the wool's rough fibers: properly conducted patch tests show that they do not react to pure wool, or the wool in their particular sweaters. For girls, wearing...
...children, the skin frequently shows wheals if stroked repeatedly in the same spot, but this sensitivity usually wears off. Among adults, dermographia may occur in either sex and show up as redness and swelling around the belt or girdle line, or under shoulder straps or suspenders. Antihistamines are generally effective in controlling the reaction, say the Little Rock doctors...