RT Journal
T1 EPidemiology and cytogenetics of conjoined twins
JF JAMA
JO JAMA
YR 1969
FD September 1
VO 209
IS 9
SP 1360
OP 1360
DO 10.1001/jama.1969.03160220050016
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1969.03160220050016
AB The first autopsy in the Americas was performed on a pair of 1-week-old conjoined twins in 1533 on the island of Espanola (Haiti-San Domingo) to determine if they constituted one person or two and to discover whether they had one or two souls.1 Although there is no evidence that this autopsy located souls, it did provide evidence that each member of this strange pair "joined each to the other from the umbilical region upward to a point... just below the breasts" had duplicate viscera. Paradoxically, the accumulated evidence of the succeeding 436 years suggests that the two partners did not start out in life as two individuals, but that some untoward intrauterine event happened in early pregnancy to separate both halves of a single embryo2 almost enough to create the two identical persons that we identify as one-egg twins. In the case of conjoined twins, however, the separation