Irina & Galina

From Moscow last week came a dispatch that a two-headed, four-armed, single-bodied human female born last November still lives. Named Irina & Galina, on the principle that the heads have separate personalities, the dicephalous infant is reported to smile and to respond to her names. Irina & Galina is also noteworthy in that, unlike most monsters, she has a definite usefulness.

Some physiologists believe that sleep is the result of chemical changes in the blood. Professor Alexei Dmitrievich Speransky who has Irina & Galina in charge and reported on her to the Gorki All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, thinks he has contradictory evidence. Irina & Galina's two heads share the same blood stream, but they wink, blink & nod off to sleep at different times. Sleep, reasons the professor, as did his celebrated predecessor, Ivan Pavlov, must be a nervous phenomenon.*

*This report would substantiate lay testimony about two other dicephalous monsters who lived briefly last century. Ritta & Christina born at Sassari, Italy in 1829, waked & slept, laughed & wept diversely, and caused religious people of the time to debate "whether she had two souls or one." Another Italian, Giovanni & Giacomo, born at Locarno in 1877, could not walk because each head controlled only the leg on its side of the common body. He never learned to place one foot in front of the other.

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