Word: simplicio
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...first Simplicio & Lucio Godino, Siamese twins, believed that Lucio suffered simply from a cold. Next a Manhattan doctor decided that Lucio had pneumonia, a disease caused by a definite germ. When the twins went to York Hospital, a small private institution, the Press at first treated the case as a funny publicity stunt developed to promote the vaudeville act of the twins and their wives. Lucio's pneumonia turned out to be rheumatic fever, a virus-caused disease, which attacked his heart, killed him fortnight ago and necessitated the severance of the thick isthmus of flesh & bowel which bound...
Last week, until Lucio was buried, Simplicio showed no bad effects of a second, plastic operation which gave him a rectal outlet of his own. Then his vitality wavered. Doctors gave him a blood transfusion. Next thing the doctors knew was that Simplicio had a full-fledged attack of cerebrospinal meningitis, a germ disease apparently unrelated to any symptoms which the doctors had heretofore noticed in either of the Siamese twins, before or after they were separated. Of that cerebrospinal meningitis, Simplicio Godino, only adult ever severed from his twin, last week died...
They preferred to remain joined because their affliction was their livelihood. Most Siamese twins have the same idea. When Surgeon Hippolyte Marcus Wertheim of York Hospital cut (without anesthesia) dead Lucio away from live Simplicio, he was performing the first operation of its kind on adult Siamese twins...
...Godino link was 24 in. in circumference, 3 in. long. Within a few hours of Lucio's death, Dr. Wertheim perforated Simplicio's anus, brought down the blind end of the gut, snipped it open and stitched it to the rim of the new opening...
...then closed the old opening in the man's loin. In a week or two Simplicio Godino will be out of the hospital, obliged to learn and earn an entirely new way of living...