Inseparable

by Yunte Huang

  “Then I’m going too,” Eng whispered faintly.

  The next hour or so found the family running about, trying to figure out what to do—or at least how to save Eng. Someone was sent to get Dr. Joseph Hollingsworth, who had previously made known his plan to separate the twins surgically if one of them died. But the doctor lived three miles away, and he also happened to be out of town. His brother, William Hollingsworth, a doctor as well, stepped in and rushed to Eng’s house, carrying a case of surgical tools.

  Before the doctor’s arrival, Eng languished in agony. Now that his twin brother was dead, though still attached to him, Eng felt deserted, and, we can imagine, terrified. He did not know what to do, or how he was supposed to act. Throughout their conjoined lives, they had acted in metronomic harmony, leaning on each other to navigate the world. Suddenly Eng’s shadow was no more, just a stone, more like a pebble, if you will, no longer skipping across the pond, but sinking into the murky beyond.

  Eng, for only a few hours, became one.

  Perhaps that Missouri boy Samuel Clemens did know a thing or two about conjoined twins. In his curtain speech at the performance of a theatrical rendition of Pudd’nhead Wilson in April 1895, the maestro of American letters bowed to the applauding audience from his box and admitted publicly to the Achilles’ heel in his work, a fatal weakness haunting the novel as soon as he decided to separate the twins: “To save the righteous brother I had to pull the consolidated twins apart and make two separate and distinct twins of them. Well, as soon as I did that, they lost all their energy and took no further interest in life. They were wholly futile and useless in the book, they became mere shadows, and so they remain.”14

  That was how Eng felt now, a mere shadow. A shadow of the dark, solid mass lying next to him—something he still recognized but now a wraith to whom he still looked to find himself. But then that image was gone, and this life, as Shakespeare wrote in the volume that Eng had read for Chang only recently, became “but a walking shadow.”

  Lingering in pain, fear, confusion, and, above all, loneliness, Eng told Sarah that he was very “bad off.” The Philadelphia Medical Times reported, as did countless newspapers throughout the world, that Eng, in his final moments, asked his wife and children to rub his legs and arms, and pull and stretch them forcibly. About an hour later, he sank into a stupor—which continued until he died. Before lapsing into oblivion, according to some, Eng spoke his last words: “May the Lord have mercy upon my soul.”15

  Indeed, that last mile had proved to be fatal.

  33

  Afterlife

  We must observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, must keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead.

  —Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725)

  While the burial of the dead may be, as Vico believed, one of humanity’s defining customs, a practice that supposedly separates Homo sapiens from the other species on earth, how we bury the dead, or how we handle the bodies before and after burial, varies significantly across the spectrum of culture and time. This is no place to dive into a lengthy ethnographic survey of diverse burial practices, ranging from the Siamese cremation by throwing a body onto a burning pyre—something Chang and Eng had witnessed at their father’s funeral—to the Tibetan “sky burial” by exposing a body on a rocky cliff and allowing vultures to peck clean the flesh before collecting the bones for preservation. The families of Chang and Eng only wanted a simple Christian burial: a plain wooden coffin—extra wide perhaps—a sedate churchyard, a robed minister holding a Bible, and a circle of mourners. But modern science—with its persistent desire to pry, and with the almost prurient interest that had dogged the twins in their lifetime and intensified after their deaths—rendered the family’s wishes about as valuable as a Confederate greenback. Even as corpses, the famous Siamese Twins had to perform one more time in the public eye.

  In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Mary Roach provides a fascinating account of how dead bodies have continued to live public lives:

  For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. Cadavers were around to help test France’s first guillotine, the “humane” alternative to hanging. They were there at the labs of Lenin’s embalmers, helping test the latest techniques. They’ve been there (on paper) at Congressional hearings, helping make the case for mandatory seat belts. They’ve ridden the Space Shuttle . . . helped a graduate student in Tennessee debunk spontaneous human combustion, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.1

  Likewise, the bodies of Chang and Eng enjoyed or suffered—depending on your point of view—a dramatic resurrection, so to speak, in the afterlife.

  The news of the twins’ death spread quickly, traveling by word of mouth and wire from this remote hamlet to the entire thirty-seven states, then to Great Britain and beyond. The New York Herald ran a front-page story, emblazoned with the headline: THE DEAD SIAMESE TWINS. A LIGATURE THAT JOINED THEM IN LIFE AND DEATH. Their obituaries, some lengthy and others succinct, filled the pages of newspapers big and small all over the country.

  While the world was abuzz with the news, the twins’ families, principally Adelaide and Sarah, faced a difficult decision. As much as they wanted a normal burial, that seemed out of the question. As their family doctors warned them, rapacious grave robbers would spirit away the bodies within days if the twins were simply buried in the ground. Nannie conveyed such a fear vividly in her letter to Christopher, who was traveling in California at the time and was being urged to return home promptly: “Dr. Joe [Hollingsworth] says their bodies would not remain in the grave three nights if they were put there, that [even] the best friends we have can be bought.” A reward for the bodies had been secretly put out, and Nannie worried that “some paid demon would drag them from their resting place in less than three nights. And once gone we could not help ourselves, that they would make Merchandise of the bodies in spite of all we can do, or could do.”2

  Neither the doctors’ cautions nor the family’s fears were unfounded. In the nineteenth century, body-snatching was a time-honored, though hardly honorable, profession. To be a “resurrectionist,” as a body snatcher was euphemistically called, one only needed a shovel, a sack, and a good nose or tip for the location of a freshly buried body. What made body snatching particularly lucrative at the time was the increasing influence of medical science and the subsequent demand for human cadavers for anatomical study. Although dissecting corpses for anatomical knowledge had begun as early as 300 BC, under the auspices of Ptolemy I of Egypt, the religious belief or superstitious notion that a body had to be in one piece in order to enter the gates of heaven had created a perennial shortage of cadavers for doctors and medical students. For centuries, only the corpses of executed murderers were legally available for dissection in Britain. The simultaneous spike in demand for human cadavers in medical science and the decrease in execution cases in the nineteenth century, however, created a perfect storm. As Roach describes in her book, in attempting to cope with the shortage, “Some anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class. . . . By 1828, the demands of London’s anatomy schools were such that ten full-time body snatchers and two hundred or so part-timers were kept busy throughout the dissecting ‘season.’ ”3 Such a high demand for cadavers had even inspired William Burke and William Hare, a lodger and a manager of a boardinghouse in Edinburgh, as we saw earlier, to create their own supply of corpses by murder. It was the trial of these two serial killers and the hanging of Burke that had made the headlines in New York when Chang and Eng first visited there in the fall of 1829.

  After years of lobbying by prominent surgeons, and in re
sponse to a public outcry over human body trafficking, the British Parliament in 1832 finally passed the Anatomy Act, allowing licensed doctors, anatomy teachers, and medical students to dissect donated corpses, not just bodies of executed murderers. Among the proponents of this act was Sir Astley Cooper, the first British surgeon who had laid his hands on the Siamese Twins in 1829. An outspoken defender of human dissection, Cooper once said, “He must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead.” According to Roach, Cooper would show no compunction about cutting up strangers’ family members or slicing into his own former patients. In fact, he would keep in touch with those he had operated on and, when hearing of their passing, he would commission their resurrection, “so that he might have a look at how his handiwork had held up.”4 Sharing Cooper’s almost morbid obsession with cadavers was Harvard professor and physician John Collins Warren, the other surgeon who had also played a key role in the public life of the Siamese Twins. In his journals, Warren referred to dissecting a body as “a primary occupation and a pleasure . . . my daily meat and drink.” He admitted that “the idea of nicely injecting a delicate piece of anatomy, of macerating it to a snow-like whiteness, and of enclosing it in an elegant glass vessel of perfectly transparent liquid, had more charms for me than games or plays or parties.” When some of his students got into legal trouble for breaking into Boston cemeteries at night and stealing corpses, Warren came to their defense with no reservation or apology: “Such instances as the above may appear improper to those who do not appreciate the importance of the objects. But the surgeon and the teacher have a high moral duty to perform to their patients and to the community; and, in the eye of reason and religion, they will be less culpable for preserving articles so very important and useful, than if, through fear or neglect, they allowed them to be wasted in the bottom of a grave.”5

  Although the new generation of surgeons did not wield the same degree of power as did Cooper and Warren, they certainly shared the passion and hunger for cadavers, especially a unique specimen like Chang and Eng. And these were the men with whom Adelaide and Sarah would have to deal. The alternative would be other kinds of men, the impresarios of showbiz, carpetbaggers of the worst sort, who had also expressed interest in the bodies. Some had already contacted the widows to make offers for the twins’ bodies. “Name your price,” barked one letter from three Brooklyn entrepreneurs to the grieving widows.6

  Adelaide and Sarah had to figure out what to do—whether to allow the northern doctors to cut open their dead husbands, or to let showmen parade their husbands’ bodies like stuffed animals, brined in formaldehyde in a macabre diorama, all over the world, or, worst of all, to wait for the grave robbers to spirit them away to the doctors or showmen for the same purposes. They decided to preserve the bodies first, because they were also waiting for the four adult Bunker sons to return home and help them make a decision about their fathers’ afterlife. After the twins died on a Saturday, the families ordered a tin box made by a local smith. On Sunday, January 18, as the Charlotte Observer reported, “a large number of persons, from every direction of the country, visited the residence to see them for the last time.”7 After members of the public had paid their respects, the bodies were placed inside a walnut casket, very securely fastened. The coffin was then encased in a large tin box, soldered, and sealed airtight. Then the latter was put in a large wooden crate, packed in charcoal and secured, once again, tightly. A shallow grave was dug in the cellar of Eng’s house, and the bodies were temporarily interred there.8 The Siamese Twins’ temporary resting place was rather like a Chinese box, waiting for the doctors or anyone else to unpack the mystery.

  With the twins safely interred, at least for the moment, Adelaide and Sarah dispatched Joseph Hollingsworth to New England to find out what noted medical authorities had in mind or had to offer. As a doctor, Hollingsworth knew how much his colleagues in the North would relish the chance, like foxhounds licking their chops, to apply their scalpels to the bodies of a most famous set of twins. Even his own brother, William, who had attended the twins on the morning of their death, had wanted to conduct a postmortem but was barred by the widows. While Hollingsworth traveled northward, a missive was going in the other direction, a telegram on behalf of Dr. William H. Pancoast of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia to the Bunker widows, making inquiries into the status of the twins’ bodies and expressing wishes to conduct a postmortem examination. Learning about the telegram, Hollingsworth detoured to Philadelphia immediately and met up with the members of the College of Physicians to discuss the matter. Some newspapers reported that Hollingsworth, negotiating on behalf of the Bunkers, had asked for a price between $8,000 and $10,000 for the bodies, and that, due to the large sum, several medical institutions in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia would have to work together to raise the funds. Some later accounts, however, dismissed these as unfounded rumors.

  At any rate, after the meetings in Philadelphia, a commission was formed, consisting of Doctors John Neill, Joseph Leidy, William Ruschenberger, and others. (Ruschenberger was the surgeon on the 1836 American mission to Siam who had given an expert phrenological reading of Siamese heads.) The commission entrusted three doctors—Pancoast, Harrison Allen, and Thomas Andrews—to travel to North Carolina to conduct the autopsy.

  On the evening of Saturday, January 31, two weeks after the deaths, the trio of Philadelphia doctors arrived in Mount Airy. They were met by the widows, who granted them permission to exhume and examine the entombed bodies, under one condition: No incisions could be made that would impair the external surface of the connecting band. Dismayed, these three highly respected men—but medical carpetbaggers nonetheless—tried to reason with the widows, stressing that the band was medicine’s Holy Grail. Pancoast maintained, as he would in an article later, that “It was held to be a duty to science and humanity, that the family of the deceased should permit an autopsy. The twins had availed themselves most freely of the services of our profession in both hemispheres, and it was considered by many but as a proper and necessary return, that at their death this quaestio vexata (the possibility of a successful section of the band) should be settled by an examination of its anatomical structure.”9 Under pressure, the widows yielded to these Northern medicine men, agreeing that limited incisions would be allowed on the posterior surface of the band, but in no way to deface it in front, nor to pull it asunder.

  Finally, reaching an accord with the bereaved women, the doctors proceeded to exhume the bodies. As the Philadelphia Medical Times reported:

  After unsoldering the tin box, the coffin was carried to the second floor of the house, to a large chamber. The lid was unscrewed, and the object of the search of the Commission was exposed to view. It was certainly an anxious moment. Fifteen days had elapsed since death, and no preservative had been employed. It was an agreeable surprise, therefore, that no odor of decomposition escaped into the room, and that the features gave no evidence of impending decay. On the contrary, the face of Eng was that of one sleeping; and the only unfavorable appearance in Chang was a slight lividity of the lips and a purplish discoloration about the ears. The widows at this point entered the room, and, amid the respectful silence of all present, took a last look at the remains.10

  Pancoast and his colleagues proceeded to strip the bodies of all clothing and propped them up to a standing position. Then the doctors took photographs of the naked bodies, zeroing in on the connecting band. Next they made incisions into the corpses to start the embalming procedure, for they wanted to do the autopsy in a professional setting in Philadelphia rather than in rural North Carolina. After injecting antiseptic fluid into the twins, the doctors, behaving like Charon’s henchmen, sewed up the bodies and packed them back into the casket and the tin box. The package was then driven down to Salem, North Carolina, and shipped by train to Philadelphia. Curiously, the shipment also included one of the two double chairs used by the twins, prompting some newspapers to speculate that the twins would go on a roadshow in t
he afterlife, as they had done in life: “Once again the Siamese Twins will appear in the world, not as living, breathing souls—a strange freak of nature—but as dull and stark corpses.”11

  While the notion of a roadshow-turned-freak exhibition was mere idle chatter, the twins did unwittingly go before the public eye. On February 10, the official autopsy was conducted at the Mütter Museum, affiliated with the College of Physicians. Or, as the Philadelphia Medical Times (granted exclusive media access to the procedure) put it in its editorial: The twins “were exposed for study.” Under the watchful eyes of his colleagues, Pancoast opened up the twins’ bodies again, hoping to uncover the mystery once and for all:

  The dreaded scalpel was first used on the connecting band between the two brothers. The abdominal cavities were entered for the purpose of examining the viscera. This investigation was attended with most gratifying results, and the physicians were rewarded in their efforts in finding that the lungs, heart, pancreas, liver, spleen and alimentary canal were excellently developed in each, and that all the parts above-named resembled those of ordinary mortals.12

  A second autopsy followed a week later, and doctors made some important discoveries:

  The two livers which were supposed to be joined only by blood vessels, were really one body, the parenchymatous tissue being continuous between them, so that when they were removed from the bodies and placed on a table they formed one mass. The so-called tract of portal continuity is therefore the liver tissue. It will be remembered that Chang was said to be possessed of one more pouch than Eng. When the liver was removed, however, an upper hepatic pouch was found also proceeding from Eng, so that the band contained four pouches of peritoneum, besides liver-tissue. These disclosures show that any attempt during life to separate the twins would in all probability have proved fatal.