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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.