Among my thirty-five detailed cases of close similarity, there are no
less than seven in which both twins suffered from some special ailment
or had some exceptional peculiarity. One twin writes that she and her
sister "have both the defect of not being able to come down stairs
quickly, which, however, was not born with them, but came on at the age
of twenty." Another pair of twins have a slight congenital flexure of
one of the joints of the little finger: it was inherited from a
grandmother, but neither parents, nor brothers, nor sisters show the
least trace of it. In another case, one was born ruptured, and the other
became so at six months old. Two twins at the age of twenty-three were
attacked by toothache, and the same tooth had to be extracted in each
case. There are curious and close correspondences mentioned in the
falling off of the hair. Two cases are mentioned of death from the same
disease; one of which is very affecting. The outline of the story was
that the twins were closely alike and singularly attached, and had
identical tastes; they both obtained Government clerkships, and kept
house together, when one sickened and died of Bright's disease, and the
other also sickened of the same disease and died seven months later.
In no less than nine out of the thirty-five cases does it appear that
both twins are apt to sicken at the same time. This implies so intimate
a constitutional resemblance, that it is proper to give some quotations
in evidence. Thus, the father of two twins says: "Their general health
is closely alike; whenever one of them has an illness the other
invariably has the same within a day or two, and they usually recover in
the same order. Such has been the case with whooping cough, chicken-pox,
and measles; also with slight bilious attacks, which they have
successively. Latterly, they had a feverish attack at the same time."
Another parent of twins says: "If anything ails one of them, identical
symptoms _nearly always_ appear in the other: this has been singularly
visible in two instances during the last two months. Thus, when in
London, one fell ill with a violent attack of dysentery, and within
twenty-four hours the other had precisely the same symptoms."
A medical man writes of twins with whom he is well acquainted: "Whilst
I knew them, for a period of two years, there was not the slightest
tendency towards a difference in body or mind; external influences
seemed powerless to produce any dissimilarity." The mother of two other
twins, after describing how they were ill simultaneously up to the age
of fifteen, adds, that they shed their first milk teeth within a few
hours of each other.
Trousseau has a very remarkable case (in the chapter on Asthma) in his
important work, "Clinique Médicale." It was quoted at length in the
original French in Mr. Darwin's "Variation Under Domestication," vol.
ii. p. 252. The following is a translation:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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