Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture

2. The Mystery of Their Union

3 2 THE MYSTERY OF THEIR UNION Ruminating on the gazes at play in both the sideshow and medical laboratory , Susan Stewart observes that “it does not matter whether the freak is alive or dead.”1 Anomalous bodies in whatever state have long been prized by entertainment purveyors and scientists alike. When Chang and Eng Bunker embarked on their first European tour, among the items traveling with them onboard the transatlantic steamer were embalming fluids. Their manager , Abel Coffin, was not going to allow an inconvenient circumstance like the death of the twins at sea stop him from circulating their body.2 The connection Stewart finds between the freak show and scientific medicine is clearly evident in the Bunkers’ autopsy. The discursive and material results of the postmortem interventions performed on the twins reveal that—like the institution of the freak show—science, rather than definitively fixing and categorizing physical difference, produces multiple ways of viewing the extraordinary body, provides arenas for open-ended debate, and often generates more questions than it is prepared to answer. This chapter provides historically contextual and close readings of the medico-scientific literature on the autopsy examination of Chang and Eng Bunker, focusing on four artifacts. First, I explore the phonographic report of the lecture presented by William Pancoast and Harrison Allen, the two physicians who conducted the autopsy, for a group of select medical professionals in Philadelphia on February 18, 1874. This text was printed in the Philadelphia Medical Times one day after the event. Second, I look at the Philadelphia Medical Times editorial accompanying this phonographic report. Third, I present the full autopsy report delivered by Harrison Allen on April 1, 1874, and published in the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in The Mystery of Their Union 37 1875. Finally, I explore a follow-up report delivered on May 5, 1875, by William Pancoast that addressed the feasibility of surgically separating the Bunkers during their lifetime. Together, these documents show a failure and/or reluctance on the part of several prominent medical men to achieve unquestioned control over meaning within the realm of anatomical examination. Despite efforts on the part of physicians to distance their study of unusual anatomy from the ways popular culture portrayed unusual bodies, these professionals often found little escape from prevailing concepts of normativity maintained by the lay public. Nor could they avoid dealing with this lay contingent on terms that they did not themselves set. As the Bunker twins’ strange afterlives in the medical sphere show, the anatomical theater and the carnival stage shared more similarities than those who worked within the former would have readily claimed. Early Practice of Postmortem Examination The first recorded autopsy by white men in the Americas was, incidentally, performed on a pair of conjoined twins. In 1533, on the island of Hispaniola (now divided into the nations Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Melchiora and Juan Lopez Ballestero became parents to conjoined sisters they named Johanna and Melchiora. The priest performing the baptism puzzled over how best to conduct it—whether there should be one ritual or two—given the confusion as to whether the girls were believed to have one soul or two. Eventually, he chose to apply water to the heads of both infants. The twins died eight days later, and this uneasiness over the status of the girls’ souls prompted the parents to have an autopsy performed, whereby physicians Hernando de Sepulveda and Rodrigo Navarro noted that there was a full set of internal organs in both halves of the conjoined body. The twins were then pronounced two separate souls by the medical authorities in what two medical historians have claimed was quite possibly “the only post-mortem examination ever conducted to study the soul of the deceased.”3 A. Peña Chavarria and P. G. Shipley, writing in 1924, found this story in the travel narrative of Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez, a Spanish-born member of the class elite in Hispaniola. Historia General y Natural de las Indias, published in 1535, is Oviedo’s account of his migration from Spain and settlement in the colony. Fidelio A. Jimenez, another historian writing much later than Chavarria and Shipley, points out that Oviedo may have regarded the autopsy as unnecessary . Quoting from Oviedo, Jimenez writes: When [the doctors] asked if the creatures while alive showed any differences in feeding habits or other activities, the father answered that sometimes one cried while the other was silent. This...