Dr. Doyen and the Hindoo Twins 

It's 1902. Two young girls are conjoined near the waist. A daring doctor decides to separate them and film it. 

     Yup, this is a story line in Season 2 of the Knick (y'all know I love it, check out my post about Season 1 here.)  If you know anything about the making of the show, it's that they do a really good job of being historically-medically accurate, thanks to their consultants at the Burns Archive. It's a story line, but it's based on a real operation done by Dr. Eugene-Louis Doyen in France on two conjoined twins named Radica and Doodica.

     In a typical side-show cabinet card promotional photograph, Radica and Doodica stare just to the right of the viewer, no doubt very used to the fact that people paid to stare at them.
     Frederick Drimmer briefly describes the lives of Radica and Doodica in his book Very Special People. They were born in Orissa, India in 1888 and by the early 1890s, on display in Europe with circuses. For Radica and Doodica, it wasn't just the fact that they were conjoined twins that made them exotic, it was also that they were South Asian. The Victorian Era was a time of putting the exotic on display (including that time the Bronx zoo put a small Congolese man in a cage...), and Radica and Doodica were no exception, often dressed in "traditional clothing" during shows. 

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