KRISTINA R. GADDY
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Come in, the stacks are open.

Dr. Doyen and the Hindoo Twins 

2/10/2016

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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.
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     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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The Knick Returns

10/16/2015

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Spoilers and graphic images below... 

If you haven't watched The Knick on Cinemax, stop reading and start binging. (Then come back and read...)

The Knick stars Clive Owen as Dr. John Thackery at the Knickerbocker hospital in 1900 New York City, and it's good TV. He is based on the Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon William Halsted, who was by all accounts a genius, but also addicted to cocaine with a bizarre personal life.

There are so many writing elements that make The Knick worth watching: characters with depth, good dialogue, a plot that moves and draws you in. And there are so many production elements that make it good: cameras that let in a lot of light so the set can have less lighting, making it feel more natural, and the extreme lengths the crew went to to make the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn look like 1900 New York.

What I like the best is how historical the show is. I spent one day last fall locked in the Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins staring at early photographs of the hospital and reading descriptions of the patient rooms and surgical amphitheaters. I came home that night and watched an episode of The Knick and my jaw dropped. The photographs came to life in amazing detail. 
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From the Johns Hopkins Medical Archives. L: Nurse administering silver nitrate to a baby's eyes while a nursing student looks on c. 1902;
​R: The surgical amphitheater c. 1903. 

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    Come in, the stacks are open. 

    Away from prying eyes, damaging light, and pilfering hands, the most special collections are kept in closed stacks.  You need an appointment to view the objects, letters, and books that open a door to the past. 

    Here, pieces of material culture are examined in the light. The stacks are open. ​Read the stories behind objects and ephemera found in private collections, archives, and museums. 

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