Medicine: Prayer & Surgery

In a New Orleans hospital last week, Ashton Mouton and his wife Rosa looked down on one of the most satisfying sights of their lives: their twin daughters, two months old, asleep for the first time in separate cribs. Until last week, Carolyn Anne and Catherine Anne had been pygopagus twins, joined at the lower ends of their spines.

Two days after their birth in Lafayette, La. (pop. 33,541), where Ashton Mouton is mayor, the twins were taken to New Orleans' Ochsner Foundation Hospital. There, for weeks, a team of doctors poked, prodded and...

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