To her mother, she was a single child, one girl, and
that is why she compromised with the name. She gave her baby the name
Millie Christine, something that is not all that unusual when you think about
it, given the Susan Annes, the Charlotte Victorias and the Mollie Graces of our
day, but there was a deeper reason for the binomial. How do you name one baby
that is two babies? Millie Christine was just that – two people in one. A
conjoined twin.
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| Millie Christine |
In later life, Millie Christine would travel on the railways on
a single ticket. How could she not? You can’t have one without the other. If
Millie went, Christine went too. Or, if you prefer, when Christine went, then
Millie had little other option but to go along as well. Millie Christine was,
or should that be were, two people. Millie Christine was one or two person(s).
Some anatomical things were separate, but one body shared some other anatomical
things. Some other things were entirely separate. Was she an atom or was she a
molecule (or even an isotope, perhaps)? When you get around to delivering
Philosophy 101, drop this one on your freshers. You’ll get at least a
fortnight’s insight into your shiny new savants out of it.
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| History and Medical Description of the Two-Headed Girl - 1862 |
Millie Christine was
born to Monemia and Jacob on July 11th 1851 at Whiteville, Columbus
County, North Carolina, on a slave plantation belonging to the farmer and
blacksmith, Alexander McCoy. As was common practice at the time, slaves took
the surname of their master, thus Millie Christine is known as McCoy (or McKoy,
or McKay). Monemia was thirty-two when Millie Christine was born, having
previously delivered five boys and two girls, all of whom were normal, (in all,
she bore fourteen children). The birth was said to be brief and easy,
Christine, the larger child, was born first with Millie delivered by breech;
they weighed seventeen pounds combined. The mother said she had no explanation
for the condition of her daughter, and she had not seen the famous Siamese
Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, who had settled on an adjoining plantation at the
time, (and thus, not a case of maternal impression).
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| The History of the Carolina Twins - told in "Their own Peculiar Way" by 'One of Them' |
Mr and Mrs McCoy treated
Millie Christine well, moving her into their house and attending to her care
and welfare, but constant interruptions from curious sightseers became
overwhelming and McCoy sold the entire family to a Mr Brower and a Mr Smith for
$10,000. ‘The Carolina Twin’, as Millie Christine was now known, was
taken to New Orleans, where the first of many medical examinations was made,
and plans were drawn up to exhibit the infant prodigy to the public.
The naive
Brower and Smith were swindled by a Texan named Purvis, who at first offered them
$45,000 for Millie Christine, and then kidnapped the child, hiding her away in
various locations and then displaying her in Barnum’s American Museum, before
he himself was duped by a ‘Professor’ Miller and a William Thompson, who
transported her to Britain, where she was publicly displayed in various towns
and cities for the next year.
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| Millie Christine - The Eighth Wonder of the World |
Joseph Pearson Smith eventually tracked the Carolina
Twin down, and crossed the Atlantic with his wife and the child’s mother.
In Birmingham, they found her in an exhibition, and after writs, court cases,
perjuries, bribes and the intervention of the American Consul, the child was
returned to her mother (arguments about who ‘owned’ her had little weight, as
slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833).
Reunited, the mother and child,
together with Mr and Mrs Smith, returned to the Carolina plantation and,
astonishingly, Miller and Thompson followed them, pausing in Charlotte, where
their plans to re-kidnap their cash-cow became known, and they were run out of
town before the prospect of a tarring and feathering. Mrs Smith undertook the
education of Millie Christine, and she learned to read, write, sing, and dance,
play the guitar and the piano, and also became fluent in five languages.
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| The Two-Headed Nightingale |
In
1860, Joseph Smith died after a short illness, but Mrs Smith continued to care
for Millie Christine and her family, and after the end of the American Civil
War, and the abolition of slavery, The Carolina Twin willingly placed
herself on display to paying audiences and earned enough money to purchase the
plantation on which she had been born, which she presented to her parents. As a
voluntary performer, The Two-Headed Girl was enormously popular; in a fortnight’s
presentation at Washington, 30,000 people paid to see her, in a three-week show
in Boston, she was seen by 70,000 people and in a single day in New York,
10,000 visitors flocked to see her.
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| The Two-Headed Nightingale |
She made a long tour of Britain and Europe,
where she performed as The Two-Headed Nightingale, and was
enthusiastically received, and made a number of royal command performances
before Queen Victoria and her court. All the contemporary descriptions of these
performances are at pains to point out the intelligence, wit, education and
grace of Millie Christine, who performed duets of self-penned songs, which she
accompanied on various instruments, Millie singing contralto and Christine
taking the soprano part, and dancing the waltz, the polka and the schottische.
She spoke English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. After a career of over
thirty-five years, the Two-Headed Nightingale retired to her North Carolina
home, but in 1909 a fire destroyed all her possessions and she suffered great
financial loss. In 1912, Millie contracted tuberculosis, which spread to
Christine, and on October 8th, she died, as she had lived - together.
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| Millie Christine - the Double Headed Girl |
Millie and Christine were pygopagus conjoined twins, which is to say, they were
two individuals joined in the back at the sacral region, (pygopagus
coming from the Greek πυγη – the nates (buttocks), and παγω – I fasten).
They were joined by a cartilaginous band of about sixteen inches in circumference, and the sacra were so closely placed that it was believed that
there was some osseous union (shared bone-growth). They stood about four feet six
inches tall and, in adulthood, weighed a combined 170 pounds.
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| Description of the Carolina Twins from The Stethoscope and Virginia Medical Gazette - March 1852 |
The sisters made
all their own clothes and dressed in a large enough single dress with four
sleeves, with a sash about their common waist. From infancy, they had
instinctively twisted themselves into the same lateral plane and the cartilage
had yielded a little, allowing them to walk in the shape of a letter V, with
the apex leading, taking their weight on the outer legs and balancing on the
weaker inner legs. Although they kept regular habits, one was able to sleep
whilst the other remained awake.
I'm happy, quite, because content,
For some wise purpose I was sent;
My master knows what he has done,
Whether I'm created two or one.Verse by Millie Christine
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