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A U. S. Case of Dicephalus tetrabrachius dipus*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Paul G. Brewster

Summary

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On 12th December, 1953 a set of conjoined male twins was born to Mr. & Mrs. Cecil Hartley in Petersburg, Indiana (U.S.A.). The mother, aged 28, had previously given birth to four normal children.

Each of the twins had a neck, a pair of shoulders, two arms, one heart and one stomach. One of them had two lungs, while the other had just one. Two nervous systems were found. The genitalia were normal.

Both twins died of acute cardiac dilatation on 12th April, 1954 having survived four months.

Type
Research Article
Information
Acta geneticae medicae et gemellologiae: twin research , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1962 , pp. 450 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Twin Studies 1962

Footnotes

*

I wish to express here my thanks to Mr. J. E. Holwager, Director of the Division of Vital Records, State Noard of Health, Indianapolis, for photostatic copies of the birth and death certificates; to J. D. Van-Nuys, M. D., Dean of the Indiana University Medical Center, and to Mr. E. S. Pulliam, Jr., Managing Editor of the Indianapolis News, for much helpful information; to Miss Helen Lightfoot, Documents Librarian, Indiana University Library, Bloomington, for bibliographical assistance; and to Mrs. Katherine Becker, Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, for kindly making available for my use the number of the Journal containing a case history by the physician in attendance.

For permission to use the two photographs of the twins, I am indebted to the generosity of the editors of Life.

References

1 Born in Belo Horizonte to Jose Coelho, 34, and Francisca de Jesus, 25, and named Ana-Maria. According to the attending physician, Dr. Mario Ribairo de Silveira, this was a case of identical twins imperfectly separated. The twins had separate stomachs and small intestines but only one large intestine, one rectum, and a single urogenital system.

2 As a rule the life of coalescent twins is of short duration. A two-headed and three-armed baby born in Detroit in 1930 died at birth as did also a baby born in Flint in 1946. The latter had two heads, four arms, two trunks, but only one pair of legs. The two spinal columns were joined above the pelvis. A two-headed baby boy born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1950 lived for 20 hours. The heads were fixed in a face-to-face position. A two-headed girl child born in England in 1946 lived 50 hours. The record for longevity among coalescent twins born in recent years is apparently held by the Russian girls Ira and Galya, born in Moscow in 1937, who lived to the ripe old age of one years and 22 days. See “Two-Headed Babies”, Science News-Letter, 64 (12 16, 1953), 405 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Gould, and Pyle, , Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, pp. 183–184 Google Scholar.

4 Preparations had originally been made for delivery in the patient's home. However, the fact that no dilatation of the cervix accompanied the labor pains of December 4 and 9 gave warning of trouble ahead.

5 There is some uncertainty on this point, since X-ray photographs were not sufficiently clear to be conclusive and permission to perform an autopsy examination was refused by the parents. Donald Ray appears to have had a norma stomach, while that of Danny Kaye was rudimentary and tubular in form.

One of the most interesting autopsies performed on a dicephalous child is that recorded in a paphlet which appeared in Munich in 1517. The narrator, who describes himself as der sieben freien Kunst und beider Aertzneydoktor, writes that the child had two heads, four arms with perfect hands, two well-developed feet, one navel and female sex organs. The autopsy revealed the presence of two hearts, two livers, two lungs, two stomachs, two spleens, and two perfectly formed gall bladders. See Holländer, Eugen, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt (Stuttgart, 1921), pp. 65–66 and Fig. 15Google Scholar.

6 See Banks, S. I. N. and Myers, L., „Dicephalus dipus tribrachius”, South African Journal of Medical Science, XX (1955), 1–4 Google Scholar; Roddie, T. W., „Case of uniumbilical-dibrachidicephalic monster”, British Medical Journal, I (1956), 552–554 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. Jefferiss and G. S. Smith, „An unusual case of obstructed labour”, ibid., II (1956), 1041 f.; Reddy, D. J. et al., „Dicephalus dipus tribrachius with associated anomalies”, Journal of the Medical Association, XXVIII (1957), 317–318 Google Scholar. A wealth of material on the subject is to be found in Holländer, , in Gould, George M. and Pyle, Walter L., Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (New York, 1956), and other works on teratologyGoogle Scholar.

7 Such an operation was successfully performed in 1939 on the two-headed infant of Mr. and Mrs. Emory Herron, of Bristol, Tennessee. A second head, which projected from the base of the skull of the normal one, was removed by Dr. J. C. Statzer, of Bristol. The child died a short time thereafter, but not, apparently, as a result of the excision.