by Yunte Huang
On October 9, the Aurora and Pennsylvania Gazette told its readers, who had for years benefited from the curatorial wisdom and knowledge of Mr. Peale: “We had the pleasure, yesterday, of viewing the Siamese boys, and were much gratified to find that their intimate union is attended with but little bodily embarrassment, and does not in the least interfere with their happiness.”4 Excited by such reports and other advertisements, the curious came in droves, quickly filling up the exhibition rooms as well as the pockets of the twins’ owners. By one account, the one-week exhibition grossed about $1,000, then a very handsome sum.
The extraordinary success of the show might have had to do with the fact that Philadelphia was not only the birthplace of the first public museum in the United States but also the national center of the medical profession. In the spirit of the Quaker tradition of philanthropy, the city had been a leader in the development of medicine since the eighteenth century. America’s first public hospital was established in 1752 and the first medical school in 1765. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the oldest private medical society in the United States, was formed in 1787. The college later sponsored the Mütter Museum, which would play a vital role in the twins’ autopsy in the future. Like their colleagues in Boston, the fellows of the college were much fascinated by the conjoined twins as a rare specimen of pathology. A physical examination of the twins by the city’s leading doctors was set up, and among these physicians was Philip Syng Physick.
Dr. Physick (a corruption of Fishwick), widely regarded as the “Father of American Surgery,” was a Philadelphia native who trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the School of Medicine in Edinburgh. At the time, he was president of the Philadelphia Medical Society. In 1812, he invented a stomach pump made of a pewter syringe with a flexible tube. The first time he used the pump, he saved the lives of black twins suffering from an overdose of laudanum. Among his other achievements was the invention of the artificial anus in 1826.5 And, because of his involvement in the making of carbonated water for the relief of gastric disorders—a recipe later improved by the enterprising pharmacist Townsend Speakman, who added fruit syrup to the concoction to make it more palatable—Physick was sometimes also called “Soda’s Pop.”6 Given his deep interest in autopsy as a regular means of observation and discovery, Physick would not want to miss the opportunity of examining these conjoined twins, alive or dead.
By this time, Harvard surgeon John Warren’s report, reprinted in newspapers throughout the country, must have been quite familiar to his colleagues in Philadelphia. Therefore, the new report that resulted from the examination by Physick and others, published in the Aurora and Pennsylvania Gazette, did not try to shed any new light on the anatomy of the twins’ connecting band. Instead, it focused on the psychological effects of the unusual connection on the twins and their prospects for the future. The doctors found the twins’ voices “disagreeable, coarse, and unmusical,” a factor attributed to the influence of puberty. They observed that the twins did not like to talk to each other; rather than agree with the common belief that the twins’ reticence toward each other might be “ascribed to an indifference to each other,” the doctors maintained that “it is simply they have no information to communicate to each other.”
As for the nagging question everyone was asking—the eternal what-if scenario that would dog every pair of conjoined twins in the future—the Philadelphia doctors, like modern-day stock analysts posting a mixed recommendation on a company, addressed the possibility of surgically separating the twins: “The separation I think may be practical, though not unattended with danger. If it were, who would urge it where there is such perfect union of feeling and concert of action; whilst they are healthy and active; happy and gay; and withal quite contented with their lot. At present I would be unwilling to disunite them, even if it could be accomplished without pain and without danger.”7
As many biographers have pointed out, this talk of separating the twins was a marketing ploy, mere fodder contrived for publicity, because this connecting band was the moneymaker, without which there would be no Siamese Twins or their lucrative attraction. Decades later, when the twins had to partner with P. T. Barnum and go on the road again, the Prince of Humbugs successfully exploited the prospect of separating the twins as an eye-catching headline. As Barnum bragged in his autobiography, the popularity of the twins’ European tour in the late 1860s was “much enhanced, if not actually caused, by extensive announcement in advance that the main purpose of Chang-Eng’s visit to Europe was to consult the most eminent medical and surgical talent with regard to the safety of separating the twins.”
Like Dr. John Warren’s report, which became a key endorsement, the article by Physick, the eminent Philadelphia surgeon, also boosted the promotion of the twins to the world at large. The advancing medical science and the time-honored freak show became, like the bodies of Chang and Eng, intertwined.
10
Knocking at the Gate
CHANG AND ENG, LITHOGRAPH (1830)
“Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations,” Thomas de Quincey declared in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), and he soon expanded that geography to include the entire continent of Asia, or wherever the mighty British Empire had flexed its colonial muscles in that part of the world. A prose master and inveterate opium addict, de Quincey was haunted by his exotic hallucinations—drug-induced nightmares in which he was surrounded by monstrous creatures, tortured by outlandish imageries: “I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms. . . . I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.” Like a ghost traveling in endless catacombs, he occasionally managed to escape, but then he found it was merely to transition to a different, but equally horrific, dream scene: “I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sophas, &c. soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looking out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and I stood loathing and fascinated.”1
Unlike his predecessor Samuel Coleridge, whose opiate-induced reverie took him on an exhilarating time travel to Kublai Khan’s Xanadu, de Quincey seemed to be cursed with sinister nightmares, an existential dilemma he blamed on a roaming Malay who had once knocked on his cottage door. A few years earlier, de Quincey claimed, a turbaned, “ferocious looking” Malay man happened by his mountain cottage, gesticulating in a foreign tongue, failing to communicate anything sensible to the baffled British writer. Like that fated knock at the gate in Macbeth, which de Quincey masterfully interpreted in an essay widely regarded as the paragon of English prose, the chance encounter with the mysterious Malay ushered in an unstoppable torrent of bad dreams: “The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes.”2
Even a run-of-the-mill literary critic with rudimentary knowledge of cultural psychology can see through the smoke screen put up by de Quincey here. He called Asia, where the British Empire had been inexorably expanding, the “great officina gentium” (workshop of people). It is, as he put it, “the part of the earth most swarming with human life,” a jungle where “man is a weed.”3 In other words, de Quincey’s nightmare was really a symptom of the British guilt over colonial conquest of Asia, an expression of a collective unconscious torn between arrogance and fear, fascination and revulsion. Later, de Quincey would lose his son Horace in the First Opium War with China (1839–42), consequently turning the former guilt-ridden opium-eater into a most vocal, saber-rattling cheerleader for the opium trade and British pride. For now, however, de Quincey’s candid confession, that he “stood loathing and fascinated,” not only was a self-description but also aptly captured the British sentiment toward the exotic lan
d of Asia, which now sent a representative not in the form of de Quincey’s quaint, turbaned Malay, but rather the conjoined Siamese Twins.
After a whirlwind of successful and profitable debuts in major northeastern cities, Captain Abel Coffin and Robert Hunter decided to take the twins to the British Isles and Europe. On October 17, 1829, they boarded the packet ship Robert Edwards, bound from New York Harbor for England. Before their departure—perhaps minding Dr. Warren’s warning about the potential early demise of the twins in a new climate and environment—Coffin took out a $10,000 life-insurance policy on his prized curiosity to cover any possible loss as well as the costs of shipping the bodies, should they die aboard, to the port of destination. He also packed for the journey an ample supply of embalming materials: molasses and corrosive sublimate (mercuric chloride). Live or dead, the twins would make money for their owners. In the long history of displaying human oddities, dead bodies were often just as lucrative for impresarios as live ones. As Susan Stewart puts it in her profound meditation on the abnormal, for curiosity seekers, “it does not matter whether the freak is alive or dead.”4 In Philadelphia, Charles Peale was known for staging spectacles of death at his museum. Just a few years down the road, P. T. Barnum would turn the corpse of Joice Heth, allegedly a 161-year-old slave and former nurse of baby George Washington, into an exhibition as profitable as when the woman was still alive.
Comforted by the large sum of insurance, and by the knowledge that even dead twins would be a cash cow, Coffin went ahead and did something that would plant a seed of resentment in the twins’ mind. For the journey to England, Coffin had booked first-class tickets for himself, his wife Susan, and manager James Hale, while the twins and their companion Tieu had to travel in steerage. As the twins recalled later, while the first-class passengers wined and dined on fresh luxuries, Chang and Eng had to stay in cramped quarters and to “set down day after day to eat salt beef and potatoes.” To make matters worse, when they protested the glaringly unfair treatment, Coffin blamed it on the ship captain, claiming that first-class tickets had been purchased for the twins but the cabins were overbooked. But the fact is, as the twins would later find out and describe angrily in a letter, Coffin had “screwed a hard bargain for our passage to England, in the steerage of the ship and having us under the denomination of his servants—all for the paltry savings of $100 and yet wishing to keep us in good temper and wishing moreover to make us believe that he spared no expense for our comfort.”5 Regarded as freaks, the twins would always have to fight to be treated as humans. The battle had merely begun, and the odds were against them, as England awaited their arrival.
After a month of rough autumn sailing across the icy-cold Atlantic, the Robert Edwards docked in Southampton on November 19, 1829. The twins were immediately taken to London, where Coffin had reserved rooms at the North and South American Coffee House on Threadneedle Street. Adjacent to the commercial epicenter of the Royal Exchange, the inn was a popular spot for ship captains and business representatives of American and European firms, who could get access there to American newspapers and obtain information about “the arrival and departure of the fleet of steamers, packets, and masters engaged in the commerce of America.”6
As it happened, 1829 was the penultimate year of the reign of the ailing King George IV. Soon assuming the title of “the empire on which the sun never sets,” Great Britain was on the verge of a spectacular ascent as a global power. Having defeated Napoleon in the previous decade, Britain saw its Royal Navy rule supreme in all parts of the world. When the Caribbean sugar economy declined due to competition and the abhorrence of goods derived from slave labor, the focus of the British colonial interest shifted to Asia, with the East India Company fast expanding its reach in India and China. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain the technological advantage over these Asian countries mired in millennia-old feudalism. In Siam, the 1826 Burney Treaty had given the British a colonial foothold. Domestically, the year 1829 also saw the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which for the first time allowed Catholic MPs to sit in Parliament. And after Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act, sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, the first thousand police officers, dressed in blue tailcoats and top hats, began to patrol the streets of London on September 29. These sartorially enhanced police were first nicknamed “Peelers,” and then dubbed “Bobbies,” both in honor of the minister who had pushed the bill through Parliament.
Arriving in London, then housing a staggering population of more than one and a half million, the twins were impressed not only by the newly minted Peelers on foot patrol, but also by the dense fog that had historically given the city its unique reputation. Ever since the eighteenth century, the smoke and soot from coal burning in the full-throttled engines of the Industrial Revolution led to a climatic menace. On long winter days, yellow, sulfurous smog blanketed the city and blocked the sun. In the famous opening of Bleak House (1853), Charles Dickens gave us a vivid description of how his native city suffered in the hoary grip of the demonic veil: “Fog everywhere. . . . Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all ’round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”7
On the day of the twins’ arrival, The Times reported that what Dickens called a nether sky of fog had covered the metropolis and its vicinity: “In Westminster-road, at 11 o’clock in the morning, the opposite side was not visible. At 12 o’clock you could discern objects at a distance of 300 yards, and this continued for an hour or more, but at the same time the neighborhood of the Royal Exchange was nearly in midnight gloom.”8 Inured to the natural surroundings of a Siamese river town, Chang and Eng at first did not know what to make of the strange sights of a densely populated city rendered ghostly by smog. According to James Hale, “the day after their arrival there, it being necessary to have lighted candles in the drawing room at noon, in consequence of the fog and smoke, they went to bed, insisting that it was not possible it could be day-time.” Moreover, the damp weather did not agree with the twins, who both immediately fell ill, suffering from colds and coughs. Despite their discomfort, these young fellows tried to keep up their spirits through wisecracking, a character trait that would stand them in good stead on and off stage. Taking a deadened coal from the grate and holding it up, they called it “the London sun.” Seeing snowfall for the first time in their lives, they asked, perhaps mockingly, “whether it was sugar or salt.”9
The reporters invited by Coffin for a sneak preview were smitten with what they saw. Their published reports soon filled the pages of newspapers distributed all over the British Isles. A lengthy article in the Times described the physical features of these wonder boys, playing up on the theme that the twins were at once strikingly normal, just like each one of us, and freakishly abnormal:
They are two distinct and perfect youths, about 18 years of age, possessing all the faculties and powers usually possessed at that period of life, united together by a short band at the pit of the stomach. . . . Their arms and legs are perfectly free to move. . . . In their ordinary motions they resemble two persons waltzing more than anything else we know of. In a room they seem to roll about, as it were, but when they walk to any distance, they proceed straight forward with a gait like other people. As they rose up or sat down, or stooped, their movements reminded us occasionally of two playful kittens with their legs round each other; they were, though strange, not ungraceful, and without the appearance of constraint and irksomeness.
The reporters drew attention to the twins’ racial, or specifically Chinese, features, at a time when Chinese were still a rare sight in London. This was still a few decades before a large influx of Chinese immigrants would turn a part of the East
End into the infamous Limehouse District, depicted in popular literature as a warren of opium dens, gambling parlors, and brothels:
In the colour of their skins, in the form of the nose, lips, and eyes, they resemble the Chinese, whom our readers may probably have seen occasionally about the streets of London, but they have not that broad and flat face which is characteristic of the Mongol race. Their foreheads are higher and narrower than those of the majority of their countrymen. The expression of their countenance is cheerful and pleasing rather than otherwise, and they seem much delighted with any attention paid to them.
In conclusion, the reporters reiterated their opening thesis, tantalizing the readers with a promise of wonder without impropriety: “Without being in the least disgusting or unpleasant, like almost all monstrosities, these youths are certainly one of the most extraordinary freaks of nature that has ever been witnessed.”10
On November 24, after the twins had recovered, a private viewing party was held at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, setting the stage for the public exhibition later. As in all previous previews in American cities, Coffin and Hunter, the proud co-owners, invited a most distinguished group of doctors and other social elites to this event. The guests were a roll call of the upper echelons of London in the fields of medicine, science, and politics: Leigh Thomas, president of the Royal College of Surgeons; Sir Astley Cooper, indisputably the most eminent surgeon and anatomist of the time and an authority on vascular surgery; Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, a physiologist and surgeon who pioneered research into bone and joint disease and to whom Henry Gray would dedicate his famous book Gray’s Anatomy in 1858; Sir Charles Locock, an obstetrician to the future Queen Victoria; William Reid Clanny, doctor and inventor of the safety lamp for coal mines; Henry Halford, physician extraordinary to King George III; George Birkbeck, doctor, academic, and philanthropist, who founded Birkbeck College (now part of the University of London); John Harrison Curtis, aurist (otologist) who treated deafness and wrote the most authoritative book in the field, A Treatise on the Physiology and Diseases of the Ear (1817); and other distinguished guests.
