Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels [Hardcover]

although we are taught that our interests in "freaks" is wrong and twisted, Jan Bondeson challenges this idea and takes us back to a time when such curiosity was normal and accepted, and some freaks were like rock stars. This book is intelligent, well written, insightful and very interesting. With excellent research Mr. Bondeson shows us how these people lived, some of their joys and many of their sorrows. He deconstructs some of the mythology that surronds these people and their stories. He shows us formost that they are simply people. I highly recomment it.

Jan Bondeson, a prolific, multilingual medical lecturer, has made a career of popularizing medical curiosities, but unlike other popularizers, he has also published technical studies of the same subjects -- some famous, some unearthed from ancient libraries -- in professional journals.

Thus, he brings a dose of medical sophistication and historical rigor to a topic that is, understandably, often treated shallowly.

As it turns out, not all the curiosities in "The Two-headed Boy" are medical. At least two are psychological only -- fakes.

The history of how fakes were understood before they were understood to be fakes has its own interest. Although the reader interested only in sensational freaks will find plenty of them here, lavishly illustrated, too, the presentation is likely to be offputting for the casual gawker. Bondeson himself has little use for such, whether rude yokels or elegant townies.

Well, it is a dangerous thing to delve into such a field without finding scoffers to point out that the writer and/or the reviewer may be deluding himself about his higher motives.

Nevertheless, as human beings with just one head (if that), our fascination for those with more than one is both very human and, if deftly handled, a legitimate exploration of social understanding as much as of organic pathology.

Bondeson is deft.

While it can never have been socially fashionable to grow up with two heads or covered with hair or sprouting horns, it was arguably worse to do so in premodern Europe. Almost all of Bondeson's examples come from Europe, although many of the older ones from regions where few English-speakers can navigate the libraries as well as Bondeson, a Swede, can.

In the old days of isolated villages, the life of a freak could be more or less tolerable or a hell on earth depending on the attitude of those who spread the news -- whether vicious gossips, humane farmers, greedy doctors or -- probably worst of all -- preachers. Bad enough to be born disfigured without some priest deciding you (or perhaps your mother) have sinned.

That we moderns are not always any more advanced is revealed in Bondeson's discussion of separating Siamese twins, the part of the book that can most easily claim the high ground.

Although "The Two-headed Boy" was published as recently as 2000, it is refreshingly free of po-mo claptrap. It is a surprise, a good one, not to have to endure trivial and shallow explanations that freaks are "others" whose social status is "gendered" or colonized or whatnot. In other words, Bondeson is an old-fashioned scholar, in the best sense of the word.

This was certainly a fascinating book! Each chapter focused on a different medical abnormality. Some chapters were quite disgusting - particularly the explanation of the 365 children born at once to one woman. While the book was meticulously researched, it lost some of its credibility with the author's own opinions sprinkled throughout. Had he been less opinionated, I would have liked the book more - his own views just really contrasted with the rest of the book.

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