During the first half of their lives, these conjoined brothers were criticized.
The Bunker Brothers
They were born in 1811 to a poor family in Thailand . When they first appeared, they were considered to be an ominous sign . The villagers either shouted to beat them or to kill them with steel wires. separate.
Later, when it came time to get married, because I wanted to marry a pair of sisters, I also encountered opposition from people, because in the eyes of outsiders, they were basically the same person .
They are legends in and , and their stories are still circulated to this day.
Next, let’s take a look at the Thai conjoined brothers who married their sisters and gave birth to 22 children. Does this situation count as what netizens call “bigamy” ?
The Bunker brothers and their descendants
Conjoined people are twins who did not split successfully
Let's first understand how conjoined people are formed.
As early as ancient Peruvian Moche culture , there have been records of conjoined people.
People really paid attention to this group in the 16th century, but at that time people regarded as a curse .
It was not until the 19th century that after scientific research, it was known that conjoined people were an extremely rare pregnancy phenomenon. Its frequency of occurrence was about 1/100,000, but the success rate was only 1/200,000.
Conjoined sisters
We know that twins can be divided into identical twins and fraternal twins.
The fertilized eggs of identical twins can divide completely within 8-12 days, and then begin to develop organs and structures separately.
In Siamese people, when the fertilized egg suddenly stops dividing, or the division time exceeds, will fail to divide .
Of course, there is also a theory that two fertilized eggs fuse together in some way during the early stages of development.
At present, the conjoined people we have discovered are also different. There are about 12 different types , the most common of which are thoracoabdominal conjoined people , and their proportion reaches 40%.
The thorax and abdomen are almost connected together
They all have more or less the same organs. For example, the Siamese Bunker brothers we mentioned today are conjoined thoracoabdominals, and share the same liver.
The legendary life of the conjoined Bunker brothers
After the Bunker brothers were born, they felt a lot of malice. This result was not something they could choose.
When the villagers wanted to drive them out, although their parents felt very sad, they still tried their best to protect them and named them Chang Heen, also known as the Bunker Brothers.
The Bunker Brothers in their later years
The already poor family became even more difficult after the birth of the Bunker Brothers.
The Bunker Brothers
were reduced to ornamental objects. Because their birth was considered an explosive news at the time, it quickly spread to the royal family at the time.
King Rama III After hearing about it, he became interested in the Siamese people and found them very novel, so he took them to his side and specially gave them to foreign envoys to visit .
Although the two of them are played like clowns , fortunately, the royal family's environment gives them the opportunity to grow up.
The young Bunker brothers
Until 1829, a Scottish businessman named Robert saw the Bunker brothers when he visited Rama III. In his eyes, the brothers were like Walking banknotes .
Gradually develop his career
Robert secretly thought that if he took them to the circus, he might have a chance to make a lot of money. It turned out that his vision was really good.
The Bunker brothers relied on their talents and abilities to prosper in the circus and became 's signature .
They toured various European countries and made a lot of money.
The Bunker Brothers became the ringleaders of the circus
So soon they were not satisfied with working for Robert and decided to go out on their own.
After more than ten years of circus life, the Bunker Brothers have accumulated a certain amount of wealth, but at this time few people are willing to watch their performances.
The gold rush happened to be popular in America, so they brought all their belongings and came here, bought a manor and became farmers.
The Marriage of Conjoined People
By the time they were in their 30s, they were already well-known rich people, but they had not yet married and had children.
Bunker Brothers
Later they met the Yates sisters from England. Perhaps because the two were also biological sisters, it was easier for the four of them to get along.
But at this time, many people began to criticize them. In people's eyes, the Bunker brothers shared the same body and should be counted as one person, so could only marry one wife.
But based on the daily life and communication between the two, everyone can clearly feel that there is a big difference between the two.
For example, Chang, as the elder brother, has a significantly bigger temper and is more outgoing.
But as a younger brother, En seems to be very quiet and prefers reading.
The Bunker brothers and the Yates sisters
So the Bunker brothers should be regarded as two completely different people, so they resolutely married the Yates sisters, and is not considered a bigamy crime.
The Bunker brothers couldn't live apart, so they even customized a large bed that could accommodate four people. Their married life was very harmonious.
They even raised 22 children together, of which Chang had 12 with his wife, and Eun had 10 with his wife.
Originally, the four of them were worried that their children would be like them after birth, but luckily every child was healthy .
The genes of the Bunker brothers did not affect their offspring
But not every team of conjoined people's marriage life can be so smooth, because the connected organs and parts of the Bunker brothers' bodies actually do not affect their lives too much.
Conjoined sisters' longing for marriage
But conjoined sisters , who was born in the United States in 1990, are very distressed about marriage.
They are connected together almost from the neck, and the organs in the upper body are almost equally divided, but starting from the liver, the organs in the lower body can basically only be shared, including the liver, large and small intestines, bladder, uterus and genitals wait.
Siamese sisters who study together
They can only take care of one side of their bodies because they cannot feel each other's other half.
But they still have two independent brains with different ideas. In order to prove the difference between them, they will take the same test paper twice and take the test twice, and they must study for their driver's licenses separately.
But what troubles them now is how to find a suitable partner. In modern law, there is no special distinction between conjoined people.
So in the future, if two sisters marry a man at the same time, will it be considered bigamy?
You have to take the driver's license test twice
After all, conjoined people have two ID cards, and in the marriage law , a man can only register to marry one woman at the same time.
Even if two people get married separately, how should they live? We still don’t have very definite answers to these questions.
The life of conjoined people
In the eyes of many people, the life of conjoined people is very inconvenient, and in the past when technology and economy were not developed , there were still some conjoined people who were taken to the circus like the Bunker Brothers. Group pressing.
There are even conjoined people who became the subjects of experiments after they were born .
For example, Martha and Dasha were born in 1950. They were connected from the waist up, making it very inconvenient to move.
In the laboratory, they were treated as aliens and conducted various experiments, including observing their reactions in extreme temperature environments and deprivation of their senses .
This kind of life lasted for a long time, and eventually one of the two had a tendency to self-mutilate , while the other became very sensitive.
The lives of conjoined people are not only forcibly connected together, their lives are also almost connected.
Sisters with connected lower bodies
For example, after the Bunker brothers experienced a period of glory, their property was reduced to zero after the war, which made the brother start alcoholism.
The livers of the two are connected together. The elder brother's alcoholism will inevitably cause certain damage to the liver, so the originally healthy younger brother also begins to have problems.
Later, my brother's health deteriorated, and due to 's medical treatment at the time, it was impossible to separate the two..
So in the end, after the brother passed away, even though the children and grandchildren desperately massaged the brother and tried to wait until the doctor arrived to force the two bodies to separate, the younger brother still followed the older brother two hours later.
The Bunker brothers and their descendants
After an autopsy on the bodies of the two brothers, it was determined that the elder brother died of cerebral infarction, while the younger brother died of organ failure.
It seems that after the death of the elder brother, the younger brother's body tried to save his life, so it produced too many red blood cells , eventually leading to death.
In the medical records of the past, in almost all cases of conjoined people, when one person was born, the other person followed closely behind.
Although their lives may have been rough, they really achieved " was born on the same day, same year, same month, and died on the same day, same year, same month ".
