Word: simplicio
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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...
...nasty cold during the motor trip. Soon he called in Dr. Benjamin Fabricant, a young physician four years out of New York University Medical School who had an office in the Godinos' apartment building. When the cold proved to be pneumonia, Dr. Fabricant sent sick Lucio and healthy Simplicio to York Hospital, a small private institution. The Press discovered the case, piled into the hospital, photographed the strange sickbed, the grieving wives, reported that Simplicio was ravenous for a cigaret, irked that Lucio's illness prohibited him from having it. Then the story ceased to be funny...
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...