Spectacle and Secrecy: Press Coverage of Conjoined Twins in 1950s Britain

In the early 1950s, when the National Health Service (NHS) was still in its infancy, the British public was gripped by news reports of two attempts at the surgical separation of conjoined twins. The first operation involved one-year-old twin girls from Kano, Nigeria. The twins were xiphopagus (joined at the lower sternum) and shared a liver, separation was attempted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital in December 1953. One child survived. In February 1955 news broke of the birth of craniophagus twins (joined at the head) in Keighley, West Yorkshire. Separation of the month-old girls was attempted at London’s University College Hospital, but neither child survived. Today, medical ethics and disability-politics increasingly provide the matrix for public debate about the surgical separation of conjoined twins. ‘‘Sacrifice surgery’’ is the term now used to describe interventions that will inevitably result in the death of one child. Even in cases where separation does not imply sacrifice, the emergence of new perspectives on ‘‘disability’’ are now questioning the assumption that separation is a preferable state. The public debate provoked by the Kano and Keighley cases was the product of a markedly different context. The ethics of the procedure itself were never an issue, because the conditions for the possibility of such a debate had yet to arrive. Ethical concerns were mobilized in relation to the Kano and Keighley cases, but they focused exclusively on the nature of medicine’s own professional ethics and matters of confidentiality. What prompted these specific concerns was the intense level of press interest in the twins and the medical personnel involved in the operations. In the context of the 1950s it was medical communication rather than surgical separation that was considered controversial, unethical and in need of regulation. The Kano and Keighley cases open up a number of interesting questions about British medicine in the early years of the NHS. In what ways did the new service, and its nationalized hospitals, impact on the nature and development of medicine’s professional ethics, or on relations between the medical profession and the popular press? These questions were raised in debates about press coverage of the twins; it was the popular representation of these cases that became the source of controversy and a site