9 
Call it love at first sight. Philadelphia—the city that still has Chang and Eng’s fused liver in a tub of preservative liquid inside a museum, where a visitor can see a section of the brain of President Garfield’s assassin as well as millions of other medical oddities and pathological specimens—first saw the conjoined twins in October 1829. After they had taken New York City by storm, Chang and Eng proceeded by steamboat and stage to the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence.
Foreign visitors to Philadelphia often complained about its dull physical layout, a rigidly rectangular grid of streets distinguished from one another, as Tocqueville put it, “by number rather than name . . . of a saint, a famous man, an event.” Fanny Trollope hated its “extreme and almost wearisome regularity,” and so did Dickens, who visited the city and said, “I would have given the world for a crooked street.” The dreary city planning made Tocqueville believe that “these people know nothing but arithmetic.”1 However, what Philadelphia lacked in physical variety, it made up for in spiritual diversity. Founded by William Penn in 1681, this town on the Delaware River had attracted Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and especially Quakers, who were drawn by Penn’s policy of religious tolerance. Literally meaning the “City of Brotherly Love,” Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century had become a bustling mix of diverse communities and the third-largest port on the Atlantic seaboard, after Boston and New York.2
In some ways, Philadelphians, more than a hundred thousand strong in 1829, were ideal viewers who could best appreciate the kind of exoticism brought by the “wonder boys” from Siam. As early as 1784, the same year that the Empress of China, refitted from a gunboat during the Revolutionary War, had docked in Canton and opened the China Trade route, Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia, the first of its kind in the young republic, had displayed Chinese curiosities among its collection of objects from Africa and India. The legendary founder of the museum, Charles Willson Peale, had started out as a portrait painter, capturing the profiles of many American notables at the time of the Revolutionary War. Peale had developed a strong interest in natural history and had collected artifacts and specimens and displayed them in his own home in Philadelphia before moving them to what would become the nation’s first public museum in 1786. Among the items Peale had displayed, “what attracted the greatest curiosity was the collection of wrappings used to bind the feet of Chinese women and the tiny shoes and slippers that fit bound feet.” By the time the Siamese Twins arrived, Peale’s, now renamed the Philadelphia Museum, had assembled a sizable collection of Chinese artifacts that included wax models of “Chinese Laborers and Gentlemen,” standing side by side with models of Native Americans and other “exotic” people.3 But neither life-groups in dioramas nor life-size wax figures came close to sparking the electrifying sensation that two conjoined bodies in flesh and blood would generate.
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.