Medicine: Son & Nephew

A solidly respectable, 85-year-old farmer named Robert E. Bunker died last week at his home on the outskirts of Mount Airy, a rural community in North Carolina. He was the last of twelve children of Eng, half of the once-famed pair of Siamese twins displayed throughout the nation by Showman P. T. Barnum in the early 19th Century.

Nothing in the crowd of sturdy, suntanned relatives who saw Farmer Bunker to his grave could remind anyone of the medical quirk—luridly advertised by Barnum—that made freaks of their ancestors.

The nexus of flesh and tissue that...

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