by Yunte Huang
The Patriot article also identified key players in the staging of exhibition—the medical doctors. The rise of medical science in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the institution of the freak show as a business. In premodern times, human monstrosity, whether collected in a gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities or displayed in taverns and on street corners, had been interpreted as evidence of God’s design or wrath, woven into a narrative of wonder, suggestive of such mythological figures as centaurs, griffins, sphinxes, mermaids, and cyclops. As medical science matured and eclipsed religion to become the authoritative cultural narrative, anomalous bodies began increasingly to be represented as pathology cases, to be classified and studied by experts of teratology. Wonder turned into error, the marvelous into the deviant, and the stage for a freak show also became a medical theater, where the esteemed “lecturers” or “professors” would provide authoritative assessments of the displayed monstrosity.15
The first medical authority to put a stamp of approval on the Siamese Twins was a man keenly aware of medicine as public theater. John Collins Warren, hailing from an illustrious line of Boston doctors and trained in Edinburgh, was the face of medicine in nineteenth-century America. In 1815, Warren had inherited from his father the mantle of a chair professorship at Harvard, and the next year he became the first dean of Harvard Medical School. Soon he became the founding member of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and in 1824 he was appointed consulting physician of the city of Boston. When he was invited to examine the newly imported Siamese Twins, Warren was by all accounts at the peak of his career: He was a leading surgeon in New England, a champion of the temperance cause, and the founding editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (precursor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine).
Besides his pedigree and accomplishments, what distinguished Warren from his peers was his role as an impresario of staging medicine for public viewing. In 1823, someone donated an Egyptian mummy to the Massachusetts General Hospital. While his colleagues puzzled over what to do with a millennia-old corpse that seemed to have little to contribute to medical science, Warren took charge of installing the mummy as a museum piece at the hospital. A consummate scholar, he researched antiquities, consulted Diodorus and Herodotus, and published an article about the mummy in the Boston Journal of Philosophy and the Arts. With an eye on connecting with local readers, Warren alluded in his article to the curious case of Timothy Sprague, a local man in Malden who had died of a snake bite in 1765. Having lain in the ground for more than fifty years, Sprague’s body was exhumed by accident in 1817 and found to be in surprisingly good condition: The skin was firm and strong, the flesh solid, and the cellular membrane resembled “the grain of the under surface of leather.” The features of the corpse were so well preserved that “they were at once recognized by those who knew him when living.” The connection between antiquity and local lore did the trick for Warren’s first curatorial venture: The mummy exhibition was so successful that it brought in about $3,000 to the hospital’s coffers in a single year.16 Warren’s most famous contribution to the medical theater would be his orchestration in 1846 of the first use of ether anesthesia in surgery, an operation staged publicly like a peep show, with a hired photographer in attendance. In fact, there was so much theatricality involved in that surgical amputation that Warren, mindful of chicanery pervasive in popular entertainment at the time, had to reassure his audience: “Gentlemen, this is no Humbug.”
While Warren was most rigorous in his research and practice, others were not. In fact, frauds were already prevalent in public entertainment. For instance, the so-called Feejee Mermaid, a carefully crafted hoax that would be acquired by P. T. Barnum one day, had already made its debut in 1817. Owners of genuine curiosities, or “born freaks,” to be distinguished from “gaffed freaks,” often looked to medical professionals for help in establishing credibility. In Dr. Warren, the owners of Chang and Eng had certainly found the best authority.
Invited by Coffin and Hunter, Warren examined the twins several times and subsequently published two reports—one titled “Siamese Brothers” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (September 1829) and the other titled “An Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers United Together from Their Birth” in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences (November 1829). As Michel Foucault put it in The Birth of the Clinic, “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and the expressible. . . . A new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say.”17 Sweeping aside centuries of mythological fancies regarding abnormal bodies, and looking at the conjoined twins through the clinical lens of physiology and pathology, Dr. Warren penned his findings in the prosaic language of modern medicine: “The substance by which they are connected is a mass two inches long at its upper edge, and about five at the lower. Its breadth from above downwards may be four inches; and its thickness in a horizontal direction, two inches. Of course it is not a rounded cord, but thicker in perpendicular than in the horizontal direction.”18
Warren seemed to have spent an inordinate amount of time on the connecting band—the key to the twins’ mystery—touching, feeling, and holding it. He pressed the band forcibly between his fingers “before any mark of pain was elicited.” Unsatisfied, he did an experiment with a pin:
Being desirous of ascertaining if there was any point where both felt, we made an impression with the point of a pin in the exact vertical center of their connecting link; both said it hurt them. We then made other impressions, extending them very gradually further from this point: the result was, that within the distance of three-fourths of an inch from the center toward each boy, sensation was communicated to both by a single prick; beyond this it was excited in one only, the other perceiving it in no degree whatever.19
Warren concluded that there was nothing in the connecting band that would render surgical separation of the twins necessarily fatal, even though it might involve some danger because “it is not improbable that the peritoneum is continuous from the abdomen of one to that of the other.”20
Besides examining the connecting cord, Warren also evaluated other physical aspects of the twins, including their pulses, heartbeats, respiration, and intervals of alvine and urinary evacuations. He observed their differing intellectual vigor and personalities, stating that Chang was more acute in perception and more irritable in temper than Eng.
A man given to fact and objectivity, Warren was not, however, immune from rumormongering; after all, an expert’s testimony was part and parcel of freak shows, which thrived on the murky boundary between fact and fiction. Citing Captain Coffin, Warren stated that the twins’ mother “had borne seventeen children. Once she had three at a birth, and never less than two, though none of her other children were in any way deformed.”21 Moreover, perhaps tempted by the theatricality of the occasion, Warren took a leap of faith. Referring to other documented “monsters” in history, such as the Hungarian Sisters, Warren made a bold prediction: “Their health is at present good; but it is probable that the change of their simple habits of living, for the luxuries they now obtain, together with the confinement their situation necessarily involves, will bring their lives to a close within a few years.”22
In conclusion, Warren called the twins the “most remarkable case” of lusus naturae that had ever been known, a tagline that, along with his two reports, would become the blueprint for the promotional literature accompanying the twins’ exhibitions. Carrying the full weight of “modern” medicine, these words by the former dean of Harvard Medical School put a stamp of legitimacy on the curiosity from Siam. Soon to be hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Siamese Twins were now ready for their first American close-up.
7
The Monster, or Not
Curiously, the debut of the Siamese Twins in America was held at a ruined site. The Exchange Coffee House, a seven-story building clad in hammered granit
e and brick, had once been the pride of Boston. Funded by local financiers who had profited from the booming China trade, the building was completed in 1809. One of the largest and most imposing structures in the nation at the time it was built, the Exchange Coffee House combined a hotel, a café, and a public exchange. It boasted a giant dome, a portico of six Ionic columns, a spiral stairway, and about a hundred bedrooms scattered throughout the top floors. With a staggering construction cost of more than half a million dollars, this proud symbol of Boston’s affluence and optimism had been the center of activities for about a decade until it burned to the ground in a spectacular fire on the evening of November 3, 1818. When the giant dome collapsed, the flames shot so high into the night sky that they were visible distinctly from sixty miles away.1 Never to be rebuilt, the Exchange Coffee House had remained a ruined site, often compared to the Capitol in Washington after its destruction by the British army during the War of 1812. It would now provide the backdrop for the first display of the conjoined twins.
In the last week of August 1829, thousands of Bostonians, lured by a blizzard of publicity via newspaper reports, advertisements, handbills, and eye-catching posters, stood in long queues outside the tent at the Exchange, eager to get a peek at the curiosity from afar. Each of them would pay a stiff fifty-cent admission fee. In the promotional brochure for sale at ten cents, Bostonians saw an exotic scene: “An image of the young Chang and Eng presents them clad in pantaloons and tunics with ornate brocade. Their complexions are swarthy, even dark, and their slanted eyes and bulbous foreheads make them appear inextricably foreign. They stand against a backdrop that suggests a comfortable coexistence with what is presumed their natural habitat. Lush tropical vegetation graces the foreground. Behind them are palm trees and huts. Farther in the distance is domed architecture evocative of North Africa and West Asia, collapsing multiple Orients into one another.”2
CHANG AND ENG IN AN ORIENTAL SETTING, LITHOGRAPH, 1829
The twins in person did, in fact, shock the senses of the viewers, who thought they saw a monster. In the words of an Ohio visitor who later wrote about his experience, “The famous Siamese boys presented a sight, I admit, at first view a little revolting.”3 In fact, if the printer designing the poster had gotten his way, the headline would have been more provocative—“The Monster.” But the owners objected, and the billing was later changed to a more benign “The Siamese Double Boys.” Still, the “monster” idea certainly hovered in the minds of the crowds flocking into the tent. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, had been a hit in Boston. Even the honorable Dr. Warren would pepper his reports with such words as monster and monstrosity. To be fair, Warren’s word choice was part of the standard scientific lexicon of the time. In 1755, the famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had already drawn a distinction among Homo sapiens, Homo monstrosus (monster man), and Homo ferus (wild man). According to Linnaeus and his followers, there was a descending hierarchy, a pecking order of sorts, which made up a “great chain of being.” In On the Origin of Species, which appeared a few decades later, Charles Darwin would also suggest the existence of Homo monstrosus as a product of crossbreeding between Homo sapiens and other species in the great scheme of evolution.4
Science aside, the idea of a human monster, or freak, had had a long-lasting appeal in the popular imagination ever since Aristotle deemed a freak a lusus naturae, an aberration of the Natural Ladder. As Leslie Fiedler puts it in his trailblazing 1978 study, Freaks, “The myth of monsters is twice-born in the psyche.” Fiedler believed that while the concept of the monster originates in the deep fears of our childhood, it is reinforced in adolescence by the young adult’s awareness of his or her own sex and that of others. In the case of a young male, “his penis disconcertingly continues to rise and fall, swell and shrink—at times an imperious giant, at others a timid dwarf.” For girls at puberty, the growth of breasts is also traumatic. “It is a rare young woman who in the crisis of adolescent shamefacedness does not feel herself either too flat-chested or too generously endowed, and in either case a Freak.”5 In other words, it is our own secret fear or self-image that draws us toward human anomalies on display. As Robert Bogdan maintains in a more recent study, “Dwarfs, for example, confront us with our phobia that we will never grow up.” Bogdan emphasizes that the term monster or freak “is not a quality that belongs to the person on display. It is something that we created: a perspective, a set of practices—a social construction.”6
To construct such a perspective, to tantalize the audience’s deep psychic complex without turning them off, was a delicate balancing act, a lucrative art that P. T. Barnum and his ilk would practice to perfection in the coming decades. Captain Coffin might not have been Barnum, but he and James Hale, a twenty-eight-year-old Bostonian hired as the manager of the twins, understood well the art of showbiz. They widely publicized a version of Dr. Warren’s report, which ends with a reassurance to the viewing public: “Let me add that there is nothing unpleasant in the aspect of these boys. On the contrary, they must be viewed as presenting one of the most interesting objects of natural history, which have ever been known to scientific men.”7 According to the Boston Bulletin, the twins “are taught no tricks to enhance the foolish part of an exhibition, but are allowed to conduct as they please, naturally and easily, according to the momentary dictates of their feelings.”8 Their exotic and abnormal appearance was shocking enough, and letting the twins act like a “normal” human being further intensified the sense of the uncanny: The monster is just like us, and yet so different.
After their sensational debut in Boston, the twins were then taken to Providence, only fifty miles to the south. New to the country and still struggling with the English language—newspapers reported that the twins would “master three or four English words every day”—they knew little about American geography.9 Traveling in an enclosed carriage, the twins arrived in Providence, a city of about seventeen thousand people, where they were greeted by thousands of curious gawkers attracted by the advance publicity that Hale had arranged in the local papers, such as this one in the Rhode Island American: “The Siamese Twins, who have excited so much wonder in Boston, by their extraordinary union, will visit this town, and remain here only on Friday and Saturday next.”10 By this time, the twins had added new routines—somersaults in tandem, quick backflips, and occasional challenges to members of the audience for a game of checkers or chess. Once, to amuse the spectators, the twins, weighing together no more than two hundred pounds, carried a 280-pound man around the exhibition hall.11
Barely a month into their debut, the twins had already provoked intense debates over matters of religion, soul, and individuality. The fact that they were simultaneously two and one had provided not only a rare specimen for the medical professionals, but also ample food for thought for theologians, philosophers, and amateur thinkers. On the last day of the twins’ exhibition in Boston, an article appeared in a local newspaper posing a series of “knotty questions.” Playing on the Shakespearean line, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” the author asked: What would happen if one brother converted to Christianity while the other remained a disciple “of the great Buddha”? “Would both souls be saved since one twin was a ‘heathen’?”12
These questions about soul and salvation recalled a much earlier incident, in the sixteenth century, when an autopsy—supposedly the first by white men in the Americas—had been performed in 1533 after the birth of two conjoined sisters on the island of Hispaniola. The priest performing the baptism was, in fact, befuddled by the question of whether the girls had one soul or two. When the twins died eight days later, an autopsy was conducted, and, based on the findings, the girls were deemed as possessing two separate souls.13 Given such a precedent, it was taken for granted that Chang and Eng had two separate souls, but the question of salvation remained. Moreover, the Boston author went on to ask: What if one of them committed a crime? “Would ye indict two men as an individual? Dare ye send Chang and his
brother to jail when only Chang shall happen to break the peace? Or, if Chang and Eng should fall out together, tell us, we beseech ye, could Chang have his action for being assaulted by his other half, that is by himself?”14
Not everyone, however, thought the twins were worthy of the unusual attention they were getting. On September 15, the Rhode Island American, the same newspaper that had advertised their show in Providence, published an article by a David B. Slack, dismissing the brouhaha. “The world has profited but little by wonders of any kind, either in story or in fact,” wrote the author, who insisted that the conjoined twins, as tricks of nature, were “sources of amusement that depressed and weakened the mind, not models for enlightenment.” As such, Slack concluded, these boys “held no more significance for human society than did a double-yolked egg.”15
Double-yolked egg or not, the twins were nonetheless able to hatch a sizable profit for their owners. Their alluring monstrosity in the age of American spectacle and minstrelsy ensured that there would be much more money to be made in days and years to come. After an extended stay in Providence, they took a steamboat and headed for New York City.
8
Gotham City
ADVERTISING POSTER
“Went this morning to see the Siamese boys. This astonishing freak of nature is exceedingly interesting and the sight of it is not disagreeable, as I expected it to be,” were the words jotted down in his diary by Philip Hone, the former mayor of New York City.1 Born to a German immigrant carpenter in 1780, Hone was a self-made man. At seventeen, he partnered with his brother and launched an auction business, which made him a fortune. Retiring from business at forty-one, he successfully ran for mayor and assumed office in 1825. Widely known as a precentor of fashion, politics, and New York’s intellectual life, Hone was a diligent chronicler of his native city, keeping detailed journals about his own daily life as well as the affairs of the city.