Ritta and Christina Parodi

Ritta and Christina Parodi. Ritta was the right and Christina the left twin.

Ritta and Christina Parodi (born March 3, 1829 in Sassari , † November 23, 1829 in Paris ) were Siamese twins of the Dicephalus type .

Life

Ritta and Christina Parodi were born to poor parents in Sassari, Sardinia . Her mother, Maria Teresa Parodi, was 32 years old at birth and had given birth to eight other children before Ritta and Christina. Ritta and Christina Parodi were united at chest level like Giovanni Battista and Giacomo Tocci and, like them, had a common abdomen, but four arms and two heads. However, it turned out early on that one of the girls, Ritta, was significantly weaker and more vulnerable than the other, and given the fact that no viable Siamese twins of this type were known from the 18th and early 19th centuries, the parody was called Twins don't have a long life expectancy.

The parents decided to profit from the unusual appearance of their daughters and first exhibited them in various cities in Italy before traveling on to Paris. There Ritta and Christina were announced as "Ritta-Christina, L'Enfant Bicéphale". However, the presentation of the children was soon banned due to their young age. The parents, however, probably forced by lack of money, continued to show their daughters in secret, so that they came to face a number of journalists and doctors. The authorities were pressured to have the children officially put on display again, but before a decision could be made, Ritta fell ill with acute bronchitis : The children were housed in an unheated room due to a lack of heating material. Christina initially survived this dangerous stay unscathed, while her sister soon struggled with death. There is evidence that doctors observed the children at this time, but their interest was apparently less in Ritta's cure than the outcome of this unwanted experiment and the question of what the autopsy would bring to light . On November 23, Ritta died of illness at the age of eight months and twenty days. A little later Christina, who up to this point had shown no signs of illness, let out a scream, let go of her mother's hand and died too.

After death

Almost immediately after death, some members of the Académie nationale de médecine appeared at the Parodis' quarters to take a plaster cast of the twins. Her father couldn't make up his mind to give the children up for an autopsy. Finally, the doctor Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire , accompanied by the police, came to the Parodi family and arranged for the children to be picked up and taken to the Jardin du Roi , where Manel carried out the autopsy in the presence of numerous well-known scientists. It caused a certain sensation, as no viable Siamese twins of a comparable type had been autopsied for several hundred years.

The investigation revealed that Ritta's and Christina's internal organs were mirror images of each other. Their two hearts were in a common pericardium . Ritta's heart, however, was deformed and could not have supplied her with enough oxygenated blood. If she hadn't grown together with her sister, whose organism Ritta also took care of, she might have died sooner. The children shared one liver but two gall bladders. The children's skeleton was exhibited in the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle along with animal skeletons.

In 1833 Etienne Serres published a detailed description of the autopsy results; In 1836, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires published Histoire générale des anomalies de l'organization . Possibly knew Honore de Balzac this. In his short story Une fille d'Ève , he mentioned the Parodi twins without considering an explanatory comment necessary. Obviously, the readers were expected to know their fate in Balzac's time.

Sainte-Hilaire saw in the short life of the Parodi sisters the proof that even older reports about viable Siamese twins of this type, especially those about two Scottish brothers, need not have been invented. Half a century later the brothers Giovanni Battista and Giacomo Tocci provided evidence that twins of the Dicephalus type can also reach adulthood. The Tocci brothers, who were shown in public from the age of four weeks, never had to suffer from cold or hunger like Ritta and Christina Parodi and probably also had better physical conditions to survive.

literature

• Jan Bondeson , The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels , Ithaca, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8014-8958-X , pp. 168-173

Individual evidence

1. ^ Frédéric Lewino and Gwendoline Dos Santos: 23 November 1829. Mort des siamoises Rita et Cristina, partageant 1 utérus, 2 têtes et 4 seins . on mosaikHub.com, November 23, 2014, accessed August 26, 2019 .  (de: Death of the Siamese twins Rita and Cristina, who shared a uterus, 2 heads and 4 breasts)