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her mother’s, went limp. It was 23 November 1829, and the afterlife of ‘Ritta-Christina, the two-headed girl’ had begun.
    * * *
    The men from the Académie Royale de Médecine were on hand within hours. They wanted a cast of the body. Deputations of anatomists followed; they wanted the body itself. How they got it is a murky affair, but within days the dissection of
l’enfant bicéphale
was announced. In the vast amphitheatre of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Ritta and Christina were laid out in state on a wooden trestle table. The anatomists jostled for space around them. Baron Georges Cuvier, France’s greatest anatomist – ‘the French Aristotle’ – was there. So was Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, connoisseur of abnormality, who in a few years would lay the foundation of teratology. And then there was Étienne Reynaud Augustin Serres, the brilliant young physician from the Hôpital de la Pitié, who would make his reputation by anatomising the girls in a three-hundred-page monograph.
    Beyond the walls of the museum, Paris was enthralled. The
Courier Français
intimated that the medical men had connived at the death of the sisters; they replied that the magistrates who had let the family sink to such miserable depths were to blame. The journalist and critic Jules Janin published a three-thousand-word
j’accuse
in which he excoriated the anatomists for taking the scalpel to the poetic mystery that was Ritta and Christina: ‘You despoil this beautiful corpse, you bring this monster to the level of ordinary men, and when all is done, you have only the shade of a corpse.’ And then he suggested that the girls would be a fine subject for a novel.
    The first cut exposed the ribcage. United by a single sternum, the ribs embraced both sisters, yet were attached to two quitedistinct vertebral columns that curved gracefully down to the common pelvis. There were two hearts, but they were contained within a single pericardium, and Ritta’s was profoundly deformed: the intra-auricular valves were perforated and she had two superior vena cavas, one of which opened into the left ventricle, the other into the right – the likely cause of her cyanosis. Had it not been for this imperfection, lamented Serres, and had the children lived under more favourable circumstances, they would surely have survived to adulthood. Two oesophagi led to two stomachs, and two colons, which then joined to a common rectum. Each child had a uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes, but only one set of reproductive organs was connected to the vagina, the other being small and underdeveloped. Most remarkably of all, where Christina’s heart, stomach and liver were quite normally oriented, Ritta’s were transposed relative to her sister’s, so that the viscera of the two girls formed mirror-images of each other. The anatomists finished their work, and then boiled the skeleton for display.
    A PAIR OF LONG-CASE CLOCKS
    The oldest known depiction of a pair of conjoined twins is a statue excavated from a Neolithic shrine in Anatolia. Carved from white marble, it depicts a pair of dumpy middle-aged women joined at the hip. Three thousand years after this statue was carved, Australian Aborigines inscribed a memorial to a dicephalus (two heads, one body) conjoined twin on a rock that lies near what are now the outskirts of Sydney. Another twothousand years (we are now at 700 bc), and the conjoined Molionides brothers appear in Greek geometric art. Eurytos and Cteatos by name, one is said to be the son of a god, Poseidon, the other of a mortal, King Actor. Discordant paternity notwithstanding, they have a common trunk and four arms, each of which brandishes a spear. In a Kentish parish, loaves of bread in the shape of two women locked together side by side are distributed to the poor every Easter Monday, a tradition, it is said, that dates from around the time of the Norman conquest and that commemorates a bequest