Monday, Jan. 08, 1934

Jacob & Esau

It apparently never occurred to Isaac, sexagenarian son of Abraham, that Rebekah, big with twins after 20 years' barrenness, might have half betrayed him when she conceived shaggy, ruddy Esau and sleek, swarthy Jacob. Wiser in rustic folkways, Ewald Peddie, Yankton. S. Dak. farmer, taxed his wife with infidelity when she bore him twin sons who were in his eyes as different as Esau and Jacob. She admitted bedding with a neighbor. Everyone to whom Farmer Peddie talked declared that the idea of twins having different fathers was scientifically preposterous. For six years his suspicion of divided paternity rankled. Finally, Peddie found doctors who would swear in court that unlike twins were alwavs conceived from separate ova and sperms, usually simultaneously, occasionally hours apart, that it was biologically possible for the ova to be fertilized by two men.

Last week Judge A. B. Tripp sitting at Yankton gave Peddie a divorce on the grounds of infidelity. The man asked and got custody of the twin who looked like him. Mrs. Peddie was left with the twin who looked like the neighbor.

Immediately throughout the land arose a great medical scoffing at the Tripp decision. Professor Horatio Hackett Newman, University of Chicago authority on twins, exclaimed: "Such an occurrence is scientifically possible, but most difficult of proof. Parentage tests cannot be made until children are 7 to 9 years old. Even then such tests are largely negative. The most reliable method of proof--blood tests--might be useful, although that would be accidental."

Dr. Walter Lawrence Bierring, president-elect of the American Medical Association: "I doubt very much that such a thing is possible, and I know of no scientific test which would prove or disprove the findings of the court.''

Dr. Morris Fishbein, encyclopedic A. M. A. editor, with a sly twinkle: "The situation opens tremendous possibilities for speculation."

On the other hand, U. S. medical records of the last century hold the cases of two white girls and one Negress, each of whom cohabited in close succession with a Negro and a white man. Each of the three bore one white, one mulatto twin.*

*See Life in the Making--Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher--Viking ($2.75).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.