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Chang and Eng, conjoined twins, seated. Photograph, c. 1860. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
helped elevate the twins’ show. Indeed, from the 1840s the freak show would become a respectable family affair attracting everyone from Queen Victoria to working-class men, women and children. On the other hand, medicine benefited from associating with Chang and Eng. The public were still sceptical of surgeons, so the medical endorsements were an exercise in public relations: surgeons were associating with the popular freak show and demonstrating an ability to view and inspect, not steal and dissect, the exceptional body (important when surgeons were renowned for relying on the dreaded body snatchers). And a relationship with the freak show meant access to the ‘freak’ body. There was a long tradition of surgeons getting their hands on the corpses of freak performers: the cadavers of the so-called Irish Giant Charles Byrne and the Sicilian Fairy Caroline Crachami found their way to the RCS, while the managers of Chang and Eng carried embalming fluid to preserve their corpses in case of sudden death. (3) Such was the friendliness between the medics and the managers that the surgeon George Bolton, a member of the RCS, could examine the twins intimately during their seven-month stay in London. Bolton delivered a report to his colleagues in April 1830, relaying how he had tested the sensitivity of the twins’ connecting band by poking it with a pin; he fed Chang an asparagus and sniffed the twins’ urine to decipher their ‘sanguineous communication’; and he even examined the twins’ genitals, which they particularly resented. Nonetheless, Bolton could praise their ‘owners’ (merchants who had effectively purchased the twins) for ‘the liberal manner in which they have uniformly afforded the means of investigating so curious an object of philosophical inquiry’.(4) The medical world and the freak show were happily united. But fast forward towards the end of the century. Chang and Eng had transitioned from freak performers to American farmers, fathers and slaveowners in the South (they had 21 children between them and were committed slaveowners). They continued to tour intermittently, displaying their offspring to gawping crowds, but the twins remained more concerned about their plantations in North Carolina than they did about their freak show careers. In 1874 the twins died aged sixty-two and, despite protestations from the family, the men of science finally got their sweaty palms on the corpses: Chang and Eng were dissected and their conjoined livers were displayed at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where they can still be seen today. Medicine was increasingly colonising and controlling the ‘freak’ body. Indeed, Joseph Merrick, famously known as The Elephant Man, was taken from the freak show and contained within the London Hospital from 1884 until his dying days, under the careful watch of the eminent surgeon Frederick Treves. He condemned the freak show and Merrick’s London manager but, paradoxically, the surgeon became the showman: Treves exhibited Merrick at the Pathological Society of London; he controlled who saw, photographed and examined Merrick; and he capitalised on his association with The Elephant Man. When Merrick died in 1890, his body was handed over to Treves who dissected Merrick and arranged his skeleton for display in the Pathological Museum which, according to a contemporary surgeon, was ‘little better than a freak-museum’. (5) By the twentieth century, the rise of eugenics and social Darwinism led to a medical condemnation of freak shows which, it was increasingly believed, peddled physical deformity that threatened the nation’s health. The enigma of exceptional bodies was uncovered by the discovery of the endocrine system, ductless glands that regulate growth and secondary sexual functions; the X-Ray further exposed the inner realities of outward deformities. (6) Science was pathologizing the freak, killing the onstage mystique that had once been an essential part of the freak’s appeal. And freak performers increasingly went from the circuses and music halls to the laboratories and asylums as science gave the freak show a kiss of death. However, with shows like Embarrassing Bodies and documentaries peddling unusual bodies, the relationship between medicine and freakery lingers. Reality TV and programmes like The Undateables continue to rely on spectacle, titillation and voyeurism. Science might have marginalised the freak show in popular culture but remnants remain. The show, as they say, must go on.
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Chang and Eng, conjoined twins, seated. Photograph, c. 1860. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
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