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. 

     By 1902, the twins had contracted tuberculosis, a very common disease at the time. You can see in the images below that the twin on the right (Doodica) has very skinny legs, probably as a result of the consumption that was killing her. The hope was that separating them might save Radica, who had less severe symptoms, and maybe even prolong Doodica's life.
     The British Medical Journal wrote about the operation and acknowledged that the story was getting a lot of press, and warned, "The profession may, however, as well bear in mind that the public always take an interest in monsters and the idea of the separation of conjoined twins is a theme which many who dwell on certain metaphysical questions about the precise limits of individual entity..." Radica and Doodica were not monsters, just twins who happened to be born with a piece of tissue connecting their abdomens, and in desperate need of separation to live.  

Radica and Doodica with their mother, c. 1900 from Very Special People. 

     These extreme cases - where death feels imminent anyway - these are the cases where doctors try something radical. And trying to separate the girls was radical. Three previous attempts had been made to separate conjoined twins. All had failed.

Images of the operation and recovery from Nursing Mirror, 1954. 

     Dr. Eugene-Louis Doyen was not deterred. ​He was famous - or perhaps infamous is a better word - for his innovations during surgery (not unlike our own fictional Dr. John Thackery). One clever and innovative thing Doyen did was use new film technology to record his surgeries. Surgeons have to practice, but before they can practice, they have to observe. At a time when the medical field was exploding with practitioners (s0me receiving substandard education at places we wouldn't recognize today as medical schools), a film of an operation was a great way to educate students without patients. Some of his colleagues thought it degraded the profession. 

     This was the type of guy to try this operation, and hoping that it was the first successful separation of it's time, record it for posterity. 
     On February 10th, 1902 (that's right, 114 years ago today!), Doyen began by cutting the skin that divided the girls, easily done and quickly revealing the peritoneal cavity. He had exposed a thin bridge of liver tissue the girls shared. He clamped it, made two ligatures on Radica's side, cut the bridge, made two ligatures on Doodica's side, and cut the remaining skin. Radica and Doodica were now two girls. 
     Dr. Doyen held Doodica's wound together with forceps while he sewed up Radica. He then attempted to control the tubercular infection of her peritoneal cavity. He sewed up Doodica and the operation was complete. It only took 20 minutes, and the film camera had been rolling.

     The night after the operation and for days the girls seemed to be doing well; doctors considered it a success -- the first successful separation of conjoined twins.
      There were suggestions that Doodica's tuberculosis was improving as a result of the separation. Then, on the sixth day after the operation, Doodica had a convulsion and died. There had been a tubercular abcess in her abdomen that her body just couldn't fight. 

          In 1903, the Medical Age Journal reported that "Radica, the living half of the Hindu twins, formerly with Barnum's circus, separated by Dr. Doyen when the other twin fell mortally ill, has just returned to Paris from the Riviera, fully recovered from the operation and threatened consumption. She has been adopted by some nuns, who have placed her in an orphanage in the Latin quarter. She is now quite accustomed to individual life." The Journal spoke too soon, by the fall of 1903, Radica's TB had returned and she died that November. 

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Endnotes:
​     I actually came across these pictures and the brief description of the operation before I started watching Season 2. Strangely enough, it was in a nurse's journal in a midwifery archive in Sweden in November and I snapped some pictures because I thought it was interesting. It wasn't until recently that I saw the pictures again and realized the connection! It's why archives can be so fun...
     You can check out some stills that are in the Library of Congress's Flickr feed here, read the British Medical Journal's report of the operation here, and more about Doyen here. 
      Apparently the video he took became part of "freak show" movies, but I haven't been able to find it online anywhere.