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 joined Chang and Eng together at the waist is not an inherent trait in the Siamese (Chang and Eng, as a matter of fact, were Chinese). Such an anatomical caprice might occur anywhere, in any multiple birth. Fortunately, it rarely does. Most doctors believe that congenitally joined twins are the result of an imperfect splitting of the egg during gestation. The resultant monstrous births may be two complete individuals like Chang and Eng, joined at a single point. Or "they" may be a single individual equipped with an extra (generally useless) arm, leg, head or other organ.

Operations to separate joined twins are rarely successful. A recent attempt, on Canadian Brenda and Beverley Townsend last May (TIME, May 22), ended in death for both babies when surgeons found that a portion of the heart of each extended into the chest cavity of her sister.

Many joined twins, like Chang and Eng, have lived long, full lives in their connected state, married and produced children. After leaving show business in 1840 with a nest egg of $60,000, the original Siamese pair married sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates, adopted the name of Bunker, and settled in the house where Farmer Robert died last week. Both were good farmers. Eng was a sobersided teetotaler; Chang a temperamental tippler. Once, say the Carolina neighbors, the brothers were repairing the roof of their house when they had a quarrel. Chang seized a hammer and threatened to clout Eng with it and knock him to the ground.

Chang once had a paralytic stroke which left Eng perfectly healthy but inextricably linked for three days to his immobilized brother. In 1874 Chang died of a lung infection. Three hours later, Eng followed.

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