Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

Matas was one of the first to support Havana physician Carlos Juan Finley’s hypothesis that mosquitoes
were a vector for spreading yellow fever. After Finley published his research, the only journal
that cared to republish the work was Matas in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. The
Cuban government, in 1940, responded by awarding Matas its first Finley Medal.
Matas was born in St. John the Baptist parish in 1860, the son of a doctor. He studied in the literary
department of Soule’s College, spent three years in Matamoras where he studied Latin and
Greek, graduated in 1876, and entered the Medical Department of Tulane in 1877. During the local
yellow fever epidemic of 1878 the young student helped in the struggle. His close friendship with the
nocturnal writer Lafcadio Hearn yielded numerous late-night observations of the world of working
people in the city—put to use for medical observation. In 1879, the national board of health’s yellow
fever commission recognized his worth and sent him on a research mission to Havana. Throughout
the 1880s he published scientific papers both on yellow fever and on surgical techniques.
In 1909, Matas was elected president of the American Surgical Association, followed in 1924 by
the presidency of the American College of Surgeons. He died in 1957 at the age of 97 after assembling
his formidable History of Medicine in Louisiana, which was edited by John Duffy in two volumes
as The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana and published by LSU Press (Baton Rouge,
1958). Matas’ riveting biography by Isidore Cohn and Hermann Deutsch reads like a novel.
Rudolph Matas.
LOUISIANA IMAGE COLLECTION, LOUISIANA RESEARCH
COLLECTION, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
For further reading see Isidore Cohn, M.D., with Hermann B. Deutsch, Rudolph Matas: A Biography of One of the Great
Pioneers in Surgery. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960.
1 New Orleans States, June 25, 1928.
H OMER A DOLPH P LESSY
(1863-1925)
To characterize Homer Adolph Plessy as merely a thirty-year shoemaker when he entered the
annals of history in 1892, is just as overly simplistic as the long-popular portrayals of Rosa Parks,
some sixty years later, as merely a tired worker who would not relinquish her seat on a bus. Homer
Plessy emanated from the same community that gave birth to the Civil Rights movement of the
twentieth century.
Homère-Patrice Plessy was born on 17 March 1863 to Joseph-Adolphe Plessy and Rosa Debergue.
His family history extended to colonial New Orleans and included ties to the colony of Saint-
Domingue. He was baptized and married at Saint Augustine’s Church in the Faubourg Tremé, where
his paternal grandmother, Agnès Mathieu, a free woman of color, was among the original landowners.
After the early death of his father, Plessy came under the influence of his stepfather, Victor Dupart,
and the related Demazellière family. Plessy followed his stepfather into the shoemaking business.
He came of age following Reconstruction. In 1887, at twenty-four years of age, he joined many veterans
of that period in forming the bilingual Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club. Plessy
served as vice-president of the association, which fought for equal educational opportunities. He was
also later an officer in the Société des Francs Amis, Cosmopolitan Mutual Aid Association, and the
Scottish Rite Masons. The onerous Separate Car Act of 1890 was passed by a “redeemed” state legislature,
which was a far cry from the well-integrated body it was in Plessy’s youth. Within a year of its
passage, the Comité des Citoyens was organized to wage a legal battle against legalized segregation. It
solicited donations from individuals, churches, and societies in the city, which enabled them to plan
and execute a test case utilizing Homer A. Plessy as the plaintiff. On June 7, 1892, a thirty-year-old,
neatly-dressed Plessy purchased first-class passage on the New Orleans and Northeastern Rail Road to
Covington, Louisiana. Plessy’s fair complexion enabled him to obtain the ticket and subsequently
board the “whites-only” first-class car without detection. The conductor and the detective who would
BIOGRAPHIES
93