Shackled in leg irony: black humour of the lower limb

Mezzotint by Jacob Gole (1660?-1737?) after Annibale Carracci.
Wellcome Library no. 24994i

It is a common experience to have enough feet but not enough shoes. The man shown here is, paradoxically, in the opposite situation: he has plenty of shoes but lacks a foot. The irony has a further twist: he is a shoe-seller whose single surviving foot is unshod, presumably because he cannot afford his own wares. No wonder he needs to keep up his spirits with a tobacco pipe.

Black humour (gallows humour, Galgenhumor) is a common feature of discourse about disability. However much we may deplore the fact, loss of mobility due to amputation of the lower limb -– at the thigh, leg or foot -- has been considered a particularly appropriate subject for such humour, perhaps owing to suppressed fear of losing such mobility as we may have. Irony is a way of playing down the horror of immobility while at the same time acknowledging it; and there can be intellectual pleasure (at least for functional bipeds) in the various paradoxes that can arise from limblessness, which are prominent in the drawings, photographs, prints and paintings in the Wellcome Library shown here.

Watercolour by C.W.D., 1866. Wellcome Library no. 12109i

Loss of a limb in a railway accident elicits no sympathy from this compensation board.
The victim (to Chairman) "Sir, in consequence of the carelessness of your servants. I have been compelled to have my leg amputated, besides suffering other injuries, and I consider myself entitled to compensation."
Facetious director. "Lost your leg have yer? Regular stumps etc? - Well! If yer any-think of a cricketer it must be an ill-convenience!"
Benevolent chairman. "Quite right sir - qu-i-te right, compensation by all means, loss of leg - eh? - an unfortunate accident that for all of us." (To secretary) "Here Mr Jones award this gentleman twelve shillings for a wooden one - and enter it on the minutes."'
Jones replies: "The usual discount sir I suppose for ready money? That'll make it eleven shillings." Another director adds: "One can't be too cautious but he don't look like a malingerer!".

Coloured etching, 19th century. Wellcome Library no. 44050i

To break one's natural leg is bad enough, but then to break its wooden replacement adds insult to injury. Two approximately contemporary prints show this subject. In the one above, the driver of the offending vehicle is asleep at the reins.

Coloured engraving published by Laurie and Whittle, 24 February 1800. Wellcome Library 44090i

But at least here the victim can smile as he sees the irony of his situation – and it's much less painful this time round for the young sailor who had lost his leg in the Far East. Fortunately a carpenter is passing with a saw and pot of glue in hand; "A broken leg, or the carpenter is the best surgeon. Haloo! Young Glewpot, de ye see Jack Junk has shivered his timbers, and we want a splice here." The surgeon coming out of his house on the left has no part to play on this occasion, and is pushed away.



There are even positive advantages to losing a leg!


Here another seadog has lost both his legs to the naval surgeon, but there's one compensation: no more suffering from corns ("Keine Hühneraugen mehr!").

 

Lithograph after Johann Bahr, 1909. Wellcome Library no. 577262i

Etching by Frederick Carter, 1928. Wellcome Library no. 44343i (Wellcome Library/©RG Clark)

"What, no legs? Lucky man!" are the words spoken by Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew) to an immobile Spanish beggar in Frederick Carter's gloomy etching. It is the Jew's misfortune to be forever moving over the face of the earth without respite; the beggar's not to be able to move at all. You can see the world, or you can have a rest, but you can't do both.

Discarded crutches at Lourdes. Photograph, 1937. Wellcome Library no. 578619i

Once a leg has been lost, surely only a miracle could make it grow again. It was a friend of the writer Anatole France (1844-1924) who, contemplating the hundreds of discarded crutches at Lourdes, murmured "Une seule jambe de bois en dirait bien davantage" (Just one wooden leg would be much more significant). [1]

Coloured lithograph by C.J. Grant, 1834.
Wellcome Library no. 11854i.

The regrowth of a natural leg from an amputation stump was considered absurd enough to be worthy of an advertisement for Morison’s pills – the heavily-advertised vegetable remedy for diseases attributed to iatrogenic blood poisoning. The man on the left went to bed with wooden legs, took a dose of Morison's Universal Pills, and "when I awakes in the morning to kick off the clothes, I'm blessed if I didn't find myself with these 'ere couple of jolly good legs and my old wooden ones right at the bottom of the bed!!!".

 Yet … looking towards a future age of stem-cell therapy, who would claim that regeneration of a limb could not occur?

Colour lithograph by H.G. Banks, ca. 1899.
Wellcome Library no. 556713i

It would need more than stem-cell therapy to put poor Callaghan together again. In the song What will poor Callaghan do? a disabled soldier has his wooden legs stolen by four drinking companions in a bar.

The song describes an evening out for four stage-Irishmen called Hogan, Casey, Murphy and "me"; originally "me" was Michael Nolan, a popular Irish music-hall performer. They had spent all their money drinking beer in a pub with an ex-Highland soldier called Patsy Callaghan, who had had his legs shot off from under his kilt when at war. To recover their funds, they got Callagahan drunk, removed his wooden legs and false teeth, pawned them, and left Callaghan literally legless on the pub bench. His plight, depicted on the front cover of the songsheet, is regarded by all as hilarious, though the speaker can't help wondering (in the words of the chorus) "What will poor Callaghan do?".

Michael Nolan asking "What will poor Callaghan do?"

Poor Callaghan was a precursor (or, from another point of view, a post-mediaeval successor) to The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) who unwillingly makes comedy out of limb-deprivation. "'Tis but a scratch!" he says after losing one arm, "It's just a flesh-wound!" after losing the other, and "All right, we'll call it a draw" after finally losing both legs. Before the Black Knight, one-leggedness had been the subject of another piece of tasteless comedy: One leg too few, a sketch written by Peter Cook while a Cambridge undergraduate in 1960. For this sketch Cook appears to have coined the Latin-derived word "unidexter" to denote a person with one leg, although there was already a Greek-derived word in English, namely "monopod". Again there was an ironic twist of which some audiences were unaware: the actor playing the one-legged role (Dudley Moore) had had club-feet as a child and still had one ineffective leg. Irony and club-foot lead us on the well-intentioned but disastrous operation in Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), but we have enough space here merely to allude to it.

Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, ca. 1495.
Wellcome Library no. 46009i

Conversely, many people are shocked by the absence of irony in this Spanish altarpiece showing a verger's dream. The verger dreams that his bad leg is substituted by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian with the leg of a black man, and on waking, finds it is true. Some viewers tend to resort to jocularity, showing that they are sophisticated enough to realize that transplants cannot routinely be performed by such means, but not knowledgeable enough to understand the episode as a miracle that could, for example, comfort diabetics. 

The dream of Saint John Damascene: the Virgin attaches his severed right hand.
Drawing, 16--. Wellcome Library no. 651341i

Similar pictures showing the reattachment of a hand do not seem to arouse the same facetiousness. But then in favourable circumstances, surgical reattachment of a hand (or for that matter a foot) to its original limb is not impossible today, according to this popular webpage about "fascinating reattachment surgeries". That really is something to be glad about.

The first examples discussed here have irony and humour, while the last two examples show that in religious contexts lack of a limb could be represented without humour and without irony. Let's end with an example that has irony but not (I suggest) humour.

Engraving by L. Gaultier, ca. 1613. Wellcome Library no. 571261i

This engraving by Léonard Gaultier (1561-1641) shows a man with a wooden leg carrying arms, legs and feet in a basket. At first sight it appears to have a similar subject to the Dutch mezzotint after Annibale Carracci (top).

However, it is a detail of a broadsheet designed by the Franciscan friar Martin Meurisse (1584-1644) to teach logic in Paris in 1613. If it is the nature of man to be a biped, is a "unidexter" a man? And if the function of a foot is locomotion, does a detached foot have the nature of a foot? The answer is that parts that naturally belong to an entity and are necessary for its completion, if removed from that entity, are reduced to predicates of it. Students whose minds have been befuddled by the many distinctions in Aristotle's writings on logic will have been glad to have had such a vivid and ironic image to remind them of how the contingencies relate to the substance of human life.

[1] Anatole France, Le jardin d’Epicure (1895), Paris 1923, p. 158

Interpreting caricatures

By their very nature, caricatures (in the sense of graphic works) distort the truth for humorous effect, but not quite enough to make their subjects unrecognizable. Quite how caricature artists have steered between the Scylla of distortion and the Charybdis of incomprehensibility was one of the questions explored in "Interpreting caricatures" at the Wellcome Library on 27 April 2012.

The event was the first in a series of "Masterclasses" intended to help with the interpretation of documents in the Wellcome Library, many (if not all) of which require a certain level of expertise for their understanding. Last week's Masterclass was given by Professor Ludmilla Jordanova of King's College London (above) and William Schupbach of the Wellcome Library, with participation from the fifteen people attending.

Wellcome Library no. 29318i

The meeting focused on caricatures in the Wellcome Library, and a number of points emerged. In the Wellcome Library the term "caricatures" is used to apply to distortions of events and situations as well as of persons. Some caricatures are satirical, others merely humorous without satirical intent. The Dutch caricatures of the financial crisis of 1720 (published in the compilation Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid) show the need to compare and contrast within a set of caricatures of the same subjects, and to link them with plays and poems. The print Modern moonshine, or the wonders of Great Britain (1774: above) shows that even with the aid of the internet and online reference sources, some caricatures still resist complete understanding. For British caricatures up to 1832, the catalogue records created by Mary Dorothy George are still fundamental.

Wellcome Library no. 12182i

 Much can be learned not only by analysis and comparison but also by studying the penumbra of radiating allusions, and by taking account of the artists' visual modes of expression (such as the dividing lines in A right hon.ble democrat dissected, 1793, right).

Some caricatures are valuable additions to an individual's portraiture, as in the case of William Hunter. In others, subsidiary figures such as the chimney-sweep in Thomas Rowlandson's A midwife going to a labour (1811) can be as important for social history and for telling the story as the principal figures (in this case the rumbustious midwife herself).

It is doubtful whether any of those attending failed to learn something new about caricatures, and new interpretations were put forward for several prints. Future Masterclasses will be announced on this blog.

Dr Eady--from Soho to Beverly Hills

Watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson, ca. 1825. Wellcome Library no. 726498i

The Wellcome Library in London has acquired a watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Yes, without apology, yet another work by Rowlandson has been added to the large number of prints and drawings by him already in the Wellcome Library.



This one is signed by Rowlandson and inscribed "Dr Eady and his patients" (click on image above for larger view). The bespectacled Dr Eady is having a good look at the prominently exposed breasts of the woman in front of him, while another woman in the background pours liquor from a bottle into a glass, with an expression suggesting that she has drunk enough already. So who was Dr Eady, and who were these women patients of his?



Eady is not in the Oxford dictionary of national biography, and most of what we know about him is derived from an advertising pamphlet (left) which he issued touting his treatment for "those who are unhappily afflicted with diseases of the generative system", meaning syphilis. He is named as Samuel Phillips Eady and writes from 38 Dean Street, Soho. He agrees with the use of mercury treatment, but not indiscriminately: its effectiveness depends on how it is used. His literary style is high-flown: a quotation from the Roman poet Horace stands at the beginning of the text, there is much reference to ancient and learned authorities, and an allegorical woodcut on the front cover shows Eady dispersing the clouds of Prejudice and triumphing over Calumny and Detraction. It is a characteristic puffing pamphlet issued by a quackdoctor or commercial medicine vendor in late Georgian London.



A caricature etching from 1821 purporting to be by "Dr ED" (Eady) but probably by George Cruikshank shows a man with two prostitutes. "Dr to Mrs Wood" is the name on the long bill on the right. Mrs ("Mother") Wood was apparently a brothel-owner and supplier of the two women shown in the etching. The goods supplied by the doctor are piled up on the table: they include a good deal of liquor and a statue of Mercury, representing mercury treatment for syphilis. (Above right: detail of 'The commercial dandy & his sleeping partners', 1821, British Museum Catalogue of satires no. 14273; image from the British Museum online catalogue).



Eady is portrayed in a second caricature by George Cruikshank, an aquatint dated 1824 (above). [1] This shows, on the left seen from behind, Richard Martin, the campaigner against cruelty to animals and originator of one of the earliest laws on that subject, named after him "Martin's Act". He is bringing a parish constable in to a room to arrest two miscreants who are committing cruelty to animals. The miscreants, seated at table, are Dr William Kitchiner (an eccentric eye-doctor, musician and gastronome who lived in Warren Street) and our friend Dr Eady, and they are committing the crime of causing cruelty to oysters by eating them alive: this was a notorious reductio ad absurdum example used by opponents of Martin's Bill. Eady, wearing a plaid greatcoat (image left), appears here a few years younger than the man depicted by Rowlandson, though the basic physiognomy is the same in both portraits.



There are further comments on Dr Eady in a series of articles entitled 'Annals of quackery', in The medical adviser which were brought together by our late colleague at the Wellcome Library, John Symons. The first ('Eady the wall-chalker', 1823-1824, 1: 40-42) states that he had previously been a haberdasher, and refers to him as a dealer in threads and thimbles. The second (ibid., pp. 249-250) is a general attack on his medical pretensions. The third ('Caution to the public. Eady's escape from St Luke's', 1824, 2: 77-79) avers that Eady was involved in litigation in the King's Bench which disturbed the balance of his mind, as a result of which he was restrained in St Luke's lunatic asylum in Old Street, London. However it is not completely clear whether this is reportage, satire, or fantasy.



Several pieces of new evidence about him were published in 2010 by the contributor to a numismatic website. [2] First, Eady issued metal tokens advertising his name and his cures: several of these metal pieces exist today. Second, a comic song about him was recorded in 1826, including these verses:

Doctor Eady!



For every ill he had a pill, a powder or bolus,

And patients plenty flock’d around and never left him solus;

He gave advice for nothing,

And to prove he was not greedy,

He charged only for physic

- what a generous Doctor Eady!



Old Galen's rules he left for fools,

He had no time for study,

Reading tries the best of eyes,

And makes men’s brains more muddy,



His pills he tried on patients,

That is if they were not needy,

Th’ regulars either kill or cure,

And so did Doctor Eady.



Young men would go, all in a glow,

And to him make confessions,

Sad relate how hard their fate,

Thro' youthful indiscretions;



With kind commiseration then he'd vow to cure them speedy,

For for promises of cure there was none like Doctor Eady.

Thirdly he was recorded in 1821 as advertising his services by chalking his name on walls all over London, to such an extent that, according to one witness, "it is scarcely possible to travel ten miles round the metropolis without meeting with his name, which naturally excites enquiry into the object and pretensions of the chalked up Hero."



From these scraps of evidence we deduce that Dr Eady was a bon viveur who practised as a physician (probably without paper qualifications) in London during the reign of King George IV (1820-1830). It is likely that he was associated with William Kitchiner and others in popularising healthy ways of life and deprecating the over-use of potentially toxic drugs. He also acted as a syphilis expert in Soho, where his patients included prostitutes, notably those under the protection of Mother Wood. He advertised his services lavishly, provoking opposition from rivals.



The Rowlandson watercolour describes his louche character and vividly illustrates his specialisation as a Soho pox-doctor. Is one of the two women in Rowlandson's watercolour Mrs Wood? A documented portrait of her does not seem to be available from the obvious places, but if Cruikshank knew of Eady's association with Wood, presumably Rowlandson would have known as well. One of the articles in The medical adviser mentions that Eady was visited in St Luke's by "Mrs Woods of Lisle Street": Lisle street is a street in Soho that is very close to Dean Street, and this Mrs Woods is presumably the same as Mrs Wood the brothel-keeper.





It must have been in London that Rowlandson painted the watercolour in the 1820s, and it was in London also that the Wellcome Library acquired it in 2010, but between those two dates the watercolour had travelled nearly half way round the Earth. It has on the reverse two inscriptions recording its previous owner. One gives his name and address: Stephen Longstreet, of 610 N. Elm Drive, Beverly Hills, Calif. The other gives his name and the date on which he acquired it: 24 April 1954 (above).



Stephen Longstreet (1907-2002: image left) was a versatile American who was himself a watercolour artist. His original name was Chauncey Weiner [or Wiener]-Langstrasse. He worked as a cartoonist and illustrator under the name Henri, and, with the encouragement of William Faulkner, became a writer as well. In 1940 his publisher, Bennet Cerf of Random House, suggested he use the pen-name Longstreet: as Stephen Longstreet he was the writer of numerous novels, television programmes, movies, books on jazz, and ghosted autobiographies such as that of Hoagy Carmichael.







Longstreet was also a prolific watercolour artist on various themes, including jazz, show business, political cartoons, Hollywood artistes such as Greta Garbo, and a British portrait-subject: Winston Churchill (right). Longstreet's ownership of Thomas Rowlandson's watercolour of Dr Eady, hanging for many years in his Beverly Hills residence, united one watercolourist with another across a continent, an ocean, and more than a century.



[1] William Schupbach, 'Iconography of Dr William Kitchiner (1775?-1827)', Medical history, 1984, 28: 202-209. Online here.

[2] 'Dr. Samuel Phillips Eady - farthing token', Numismatic Society 12 November 2010. Online here.



Images of Stephen Longstreet and his works are reproduced by kind permission of Larry and Lisa Hupman.

Professor A and Professor B discuss Darwinism in Berlin

The idea of man's evolution from animals is an ancient one. Some statements on the subject by the Greek philosopher Anaximander (ca. 610–after 546 BC):

"The first living creatures were born in moisture, enclosed in thorny casings, and as their age increased, they came forth on to the drier part, and when the bark had broken off, they lived a different kind of life for a short time."

"In the beginnning man was born from creatures of a different kind, because other creatures are soon self-supporting, but man alone needs prolonged nursing."

"There arose from heated water and earth either fish or creatures very like fish; in these man grew in the form of embryos retained within them until puberty; then at last the fish-like creatures burst, and men and women who were already able to nourish themselves stepped forth."

"Living creatures came into being from moisture evaporated by the sun. Man was originally similar to another creature, that is, to a fish." [1]

After a very long period of sometimes low-level and sporadic interest in the matter, the idea of evolution came to the fore in the public mind as a result of the storm over Darwin's and Wallace's theory of natural selection, proposed in 1858 and published in book form – On the origin of species – in 1859. Familiarity with the theory is evinced in the pamphlet wars and caricatures published in the wake of those publications. Among the caricatures popular with today's historians are the clever circular drawings 'Studies in Darwinesque development' by Charles Henry Bennett (1829-1867) which were first published as a weekly series of wood engravings in 1863 (left: Wellcome Library no. 12105i) and republished posthumously in book form (Character sketches, development drawings and original pictures of wit and humor) in 1872. [2]

A set of twenty coloured caricatures, hitherto little known, was produced in Berlin probably soon after the translation of the Origin of species into German in 1860. The full set has now been published in the Wellcome Library catalogue as Wellcome Library no. 680406i.
The designer was one Friedrich Schmidt, who also lithographed and published the prints. They consist of twenty coloured lithographs showing in most cases the evolution of a household article into a human or animal type. Some of the human types are universal (an old lady, a teenage girl, an old man with a long beard), while others for historical reasons occur particularly in the eastern half of Europe: of the twenty plates, six show the evolutionary origins of Russians or Croats, such as a Russian priest coming into being from a vodka bottle (above); a waggon evolving into a Croat in a greatcoat (below); how, from a Russian helmet, a dove of peace comes into being.

The evolution caricatures are introduced by monochrome lithographs of two rather obscure drawings on the title sheet. In one of them the first ape to evolve into a man standing erect takes leave of his relatives who are still swinging with prehensile tails. He is called "The first Pre-Adamite (born about 180,500 B.C.)". The other drawing, on the verso of the same sheet, contains a "Discussion between two professors of mathematics (A and B) about (Pseudo-)Darwinism". The two mathematicians are reduced to the geometrical configurations which they study. Professor A says he finds it difficult to clarify the distinction between the prevous theory of generatio equivoca and Darwin's doctrine, so Professor B replies that he has created the twenty drawings to demonstrate it.


Between them are four geometric figures with human faces and the lettering in English "Pretty faces and some sharp lines". Perhaps a reader can explain the origins of the designs and the meaning of the allusions?

In one of the prints (above), Garibaldi evolves from a Croatian guard (Pandur). This reference may help to date the series more precisely.

The set is surprisingly rare: the only other copy traced is in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, and is identified from its description in the bibliographic database WorldCat.

Its rarety explains why it was not known to Professor Janet Browne when she wrote her article [3] on Darwin in caricature (she kindly examined the Wellcome Library's set in 2010); nor was it in Pamela Kort's 2009 Frankfurt exhibition catalogue [4]; nor currently in Mark Aldrich's website Cartooning evolution, 1861-1925. [5]

However, all these sources can be recommended for providing the context in which these caricatures by Schmidt themselves "came into being". For instance the fact that a cartoon similar to one of Schmidt's was published in Fun (a rival to Punch), 31 October 1888, as recorded in Cartooning evolution suggests that he may have had some slight influence on other artists, in addition to amusing his Berlin audience with his preposterous fantasies based on Darwin's doctrine.
And despite the huge gulf in chronology and language, his sequence showing the evolution of a fish (Backfisch) into a teenage girl (also called Backfisch in slang of the time) would surely have been comprehensible to Anaximander.

[1] G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, The presocratic philosophers, Cambridge 1983, pp. 140-142

[2] Julia Voss, Darwin's pictures: views of evolutionary theory, 1837-1874, New Haven 2010, pp. 146-147

[3] Janet Browne, 'Darwin in caricature: a study in the popularization and dissemination of evolution', in The art of evolution, edited by Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2009, pp. 18-34

[4] Pamela Kort, Darwin: art and the search for origins, Cologne: Wienand, 2009

[5] Cartooning evolution, 1861-1925: at http://sophia.smith.edu/~maldrich/evolution/home.html

Credits: Wellcome Library

Wellcome Library Insight: Caricatures and Cartoons

This week's free Insight session - on Thursday 11th November - explores how caricatures and cartoons have evolved by looking at drawings, paintings and prints from the Wellcome Library.

Our Insight sessions give visitors an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

This Thursday's session starts at 3.00pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Image: William Pitt the younger and his ministers as anatomists dissecting the body of the Prince of Wales (Wellcome Library no. 12174i)

Wellcome Library Insight - Caricatures and Cartoons

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 22nd April - explores how caricatures and cartoons have evolved by looking at drawings, paintings and prints from the Wellcome Library.

Our Insight sessions give visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

This Thursday's session starts at 3.00pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Siamese twins, real and metaphorical

The latest attempt to separate conjoined twins is going on in London. In this case the twins are Hassan and Hussein Benhaffaf from East Cork, and the operation is proceeding at Great Ormond Street Hospital. [1]

From about 1830 conjoined twins were called "Siamese twins", "jumeaux siamois", etc., so named after the twins Chang and Eng. [2]

Lithograph, ca. 1830. Wellcome Library no. 679471i

Their visit from Siam (Thailand) to Europe and their exhibition in the 1830s set off a wave of "Siamese twin" mania. A painting of them by Edouard-Henri-Théophile Pingret on their visit to Paris in 1836 is in the Wellcome Library, as are many other depictions. The lithograph above is unusual in referring to their Thai origins through the temples in the landscape shown in the background. Characteristic Thai temples can now be seen in the west (in the Parc Denantou in Lausanne, for example), but in 1830 they were much less familiar in Europe.

Coloured etching by Sharpshooter, 1829. Wellcome Library no. 12225i

The use of Chang and Eng as a metaphor for political alliance quickly followed. On 9 December 1829, soon after their arrival, the satirist who called himself Sharpshooter was quick off the mark in showing the Irish political leader Daniel O'Connell as conjoined with the devil in "Catholic Union" (above).

Etching by William Heath, 1830. Wellcome Library no. 12230i

William Heath, in his publication The looking-glass on 1 January 1830, showed the leaders of the two wings of the Tory party, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, as comparable to Chang and Eng joined by "Place" (corrupt patronage), but by nothing else: at this time Wellington (Prime Minister) and Peel (Home Secretary) were scarcely on speaking terms. As Home Secretary, Peel was busy creating the police force (in this print he is wearing a policeman's uniform). Separation was not hinted at because separation of conjoined twins was not possible within the surgical techniques of the time.

Here are two later and more recherché examples.

"Doctors consultation. Separation decided upon. Professor Ripley to operate. Alfred's speech, on the Siamese twins, delivered at Knaresbro' Augt. 20th. 1868, before a large and crowded audience. ...
See Bradford Daily Telegraph Aug.t 21st".
Wellcome Library no. 678126i

The lettering mentions Chang and Eng, showing that they were still remembered from nearly forty years before, but for the first time in these satires the possibility of surgical separation of the twins is raised:

"Some of you will know that there exists such a curiosity as the Siamese twins. They were a number of years ago exhibited in England, and have latterly been in America. These two extraordinary beings are held together by an integument that it hitherto has been thought to be almost impossible to sever. The health of one of the twins is giving way, and the prospect before the man in health is terrible. He is carrying with him a diseased human being who in a short time may be a corpse. Can you imagine a human being placed in more distressing circumstances? In order to save the life of the sound individual the highest physicians have been consulted, and the twins are going to *Paris [footnote: "*Bradford"] in order that an operation may take place to separate the two men."

The protagonists seem to be well-known Bradford politicians. "Professor Ripley" may be Sir Henry William Ripley, 1st Baronet: he was elected Member of Parliament (Liberal) for Bradford in the general election of 17 November-7 December 1868, but his election was overturned on petition in 1869. He then changed allegiance and was finally elected as Member of Parliament (Conservative) for Bradford in 1874, and sat until 1880. "Alfred" may be Alfred Illingworth (1827-1907), who was elected Member of Parliament (Liberal) for Knaresborough in 1868-1874, and was re-elected as a Liberal for Bradford in 1880, defeating the Conservative, his former Liberal ally Henry William Ripley; Illingworth held his seat until 1895. The print therefore seems to describe the separation of the twin Liberals in 1869 when Ripley's election was overturned, rather than 1880 when he joined the Conservatives.

The description of Alfred Illingworth in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ("tall, spare, alert, ruddy-bearded, and hawk-visaged") fits the twin on the left of the present print, but "Alfred" is named as the commentator, not as the twin, which makes the print difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with Bradford politics of the time. This was the world repeatedly caricatured by the satirical genius Michael Wharton ("Peter Simple") as dominated by "Alderman Foodbotham, the 25-stone, crag-jawed, iron-watch-chained, grim-booted perpetual chairman of the Bradford City Tramways and Fine Arts Committee", whom neither of the conjoined twins resembles: so much for satire.

The Bradford print is an example of the impact of medicine on society, rather than, as usual, the other way round: a new surgical technique becoming the language of political comment. Separation of conjoined twins from Armenia after the death of one of them is recorded in Byzantium around the year 945: there is even a painting of the doctors carrying out the operation.[3] But that was an isolated example, and separation did not become feasible (supposing it were desired) until the introduction of total anaesthesia in the 1840s and '50s.

Finally, an even less lovely pair.

Line block, 1927. Wellcome Library no. 568901i

These two fellows shouting "Den Juden Tod!" ("Death to Jews!") were the leaders of the Vienna Nazis in 1927. Dr Anton Jerzabek (1867-1939) was a municipal physician in Vienna and leader of the Austrian Antisemitenbund. Dr Walter Riehl (1881-1955), a lawyer, was the antisemitic chairman of the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei (DNSAP) in Austria. The print shows them so closely united in one body that, unlike Chang and Eng, they have only one pair of limbs between them.

That was then. What about now? It is possible that, as a result of the General Election in the United Kingdom on 6 May 2010, a coalition government may come to power. Should it do so, and should it (as coalitions tend to) later fall apart, how long will it be before satirists take up again the theme of the Siamese twins initiated by Chang and Eng back in 1830? It would be a triumph for surgical experimenters if the two leaders were to be shown walking away from each other with "Hassan" and "Hussein" written on their backs.

[1] 'Conjoined twins Hassan and Hussein separated in op', BBC news http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8609487.stm

[2] Nancy L. Segal, Entwined lives: twins and what they tell us about human behavior, New York: Plume, 2000, pp. 295-312

[3] G.E. Pentogalos and John G. Lascaratos, 'A surgical operation performed on Siamese twins during the tenth century in Byzantium', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1984, 58: 99-102

Wellcome Library Insights: April - May 2010

Our popular Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. These free sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

The Spring 2010 series of Insights begins this Thursday afternoon (8th April) at 3pm, exploring how Native American cultures have been recorded, celebrated and misrepresented, using examples from the Library’s American collections. You can pick up your free ticket for this event from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 13.30 on the day. Tickets are issued on a first-come, first-served basis: for more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Our upcoming Insights sessions for April and May are:

Caricatures and Cartoons - 22nd April, 3-4pm

Anatomies of London – 29th April, 6-7pm

Fascinating Faces – 6th May, 3-4pm

The Occult - 13th May, 6-7pm

Madness - 20th May, 3-4pm

For more details on attending the sessions, please follow the links above to the appropriate pages on the Wellcome Collection website.

Wellcome Library Insight - Cartoons and Caricatures

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 17th, 3pm - explores some of the 'Cartoons and Caricatures' in our collections, and illustrates the international nature of our drawings, paintings and prints.

Wellcome Library Insights

Our Insights sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

Previous Insights have been held on such topics as Henry Wellcome, Healing Herbs, our film digitisation project and face reading.

Details on our forthcoming Insights:

Francis Crick: DNA and beyond - 19 March

Madness – 2 April and 7 May

Native Americans – 16 April

Caricatures and Cartoons – 21 May

Entrance to an Insight session is free but tickets must be booked in advance.