I was sitting here watching this NOVA episode on the Chinese conjoined (Siamese) twins, the cute little toddler girls, and I found myself wondering, “What did people in earlier eras DO about Siamese twins? Besides put them in the circus, like Chang and Eng?” There must have been other sets born, down through the ages.
I mean earlier eras like the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Middle Ages. Did they try to cut them apart, or expose them on the hillside, or just wait and see whether they survived?
A combination. Some Siamese twins (who are called “Chinese twins” in Siam, since Chan and Eng were Chinese) died shortly after birth without modern medical care. Others were probably left to die, especially since many societies don’t like twins as a general rule. I’d guess that in Medieval times they would be seen a sign of the devil so they and their mother would be put to death. Some may have been able to be separated, even using crude methods, but I doubt their rate of survival was very high until Barnum.
Au contraire. In many eras, conjoined twins were believed to be a miracle from God. There is a very thorough discussion of the history of conjoined twins and particularly Chang and Eng (which, by the way, are translated as ‘Left and Right’) in Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses Unreasonable Facsimiles. (NY: Zone, 1996) I don’t remember a lot of specifics, but I do remember the strongly evidenced point that what we consider ‘freakish’ today was often considered a special blessing in earlier times.
I could go into a long rant about how advancing medical technology is killing the old freakshow, but I’ll hold off. The freakshow really wasn’t such a bad way to make a living, for the most part; the actual “work” was minimal, and the money was often superb.
Conjoined twins who survived birth and childhood could join the sideshow for easy money or live pretty much like anyone else. Communities rapidly adjust to someone “different” among them. Chang and Eng built a house together, each got married and fathered many children, and they spent their later lives in relative obscurity. The female conjoined twins from the movie Freaks spent their final days working together at a supermarket checkout counter.
And of course there’s Gibsonton, Florida, where many human oddities go to retire…
Today it’s often considered preferable to “sacrifice” one twin for the sake of the other shortly after birth. In the case of the young girls who appear to be one body with two heads (actually, they have separate spinal columns, and are effectively two fused torsos sharing one waist and all below), separation wasn’t an option, and they’ve survived to be as you see them now. Those girls amaze me with how well they function, since each controls one leg. And they’re funny; when asked in what ways they’re different, they stood up and one said, “I’m taller.”
Keep in mind that before modern medicine, most conjoined twins would never have lived past birth, and often, their mother would have died during the delivery. If you have twins that are conjoined at the waist or chest or in some manner that makes it impossible for them to be born one-at-a-time, then they probably aren’t going to be born at all. It’s hard enough fitting one baby through the birth canal. Two babies at once would most likely kill the mother and the children.
I might add that Daisy and Violet Hilton, the twins in the film “Freaks,” were much more than a freak-show exhibit. They were very talented singers (sounded a bit like the Boswell sisters) and played half a dozen instruments; they toured on vaudeville circuits through the 1920s and early '30s, and got great reviews. I’ve seen their awful second film, “Chained for Life,” the only good part of which is their several musical numbers.
Great gals! Had I adopted Siamese cats rather than mutts, I’d have named them Daisy and Violet.
Thank you to Phouka, you make much sense. I was forgetting that most, if not all, conjoined twins are today probably delivered via C-section, so I suppose that in previous eras, it would have just been a non-problem, if the mother didn’t even survive anyway. And I suppose that if both mother and child (children) did survive, that would then have been considered “miraculous”.