United unto Death

In the world they made for themselves, Siamese Twins Margaret and Mary Gibb were not only accustomed to their affliction. They came to prefer it. As adults they refused even to discuss the possibility of separation. To them, such a move would have seemed no less than amputation of a major limb. In recent weeks their feeling haunted their physician, Dr. John Appel, because though Mary seemed entirely healthy, Margaret was suffering from rapidly spreading cancer. But the sisters did not change their view, and last week when Margaret's cancer had spread to her lungs and heart, it had also spread to

Mary. They died, at 54, within two minutes of each other.

From the start, their mother recalled, the personalities of the nonidentical twins "had always been different." Mary was overweight, easygoing and carefree; Margaret was thin, high-strung, and always worried about health and finances. They earned their first money at 16 doing a vaudeville song-and-dance act in the U.S. and later in Europe. After a series of jobs in circuses, they retired to open a gift shop in their home town of Holyoke, Mass. When it closed in 1949, they lived in near-seclusion until their deaths.

Joined by bone and flesh just above the buttocks, they had separate organs except for the rectum. Neither felt the other's pain, and their circulatory systems were largely separate. But a few, small arterial branches "appeared to connect," said Pathologist H. Paul Wakefield, and evidently transported the cancer. He could not be more specific, because his autopsy did not include a microscopic examination of the twins' connected tissues. They had requested that they not be separated even after death--so that they could be buried in a special coffin in the state in which they had lived and died.

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