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History of Twins
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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 (In the edition of 1873 it is in vol. ii. p.
473.) 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
“I attended twin brothers so extraordinarily alike, that it was impossible for me to tell
which was which, without seeing them side by side. But their physical likeness extended
still deeper, so to speak, a yet more remarkable pathological Thus, one of them, whom I
saw at the Néothermes at Paris, suffering from rheumatic ophthalmia, said to me, ‘At this
instant my brother must be having an ophthalmia like mine;’ and, as I had exclaimed
against such an assertion, he showed me a few days afterwards a letter just received by
him from his brother, who was at that time at Vienna, and who expressed himself in these
words—’ I have my ophthalmia; you must be having yours.’ However singular this story
may appear, the fact is none the less exact; it has not been told to me by others, but I have
seen it myself; and I have seen other analogous cases in my practice. These twins were
also asthmatic, and asthmatic to a frightful degree. Though born in Marseilles, they were
never able to stay in that town, where their business affairs required them to go, without
having an attack. Still more strange, it was sufficient for them to get away only as far as
Toulon in order to be cured of the attack caught at Marseilles. They travelled continually,
and in all countries, on business affairs, and they remarked that certain localities were
extremely hurtful to them, and that in others they were free from all asthmatic symptoms.”
I do not like to pass over here a most dramatic tale in the Psychologie
Morbide of Dr. J. Moreau (de Tours), Médecin de l’Hospice de Bicêtre.
Paris, 1859, p. 172. He speaks “of two twin brothers who had been
confined, on account of monomania, at Bicêtre”
“Physically the two young men are so nearly alike that the one is easily mistaken for
the other. Morally, their resemblance is no less complete, and is most remarkable in its
details. Thus, their dominant ideas are absolutely the same. They both consider themselves
subject to imaginary persecutions; the same enemies have sworn their destruction, and
employ the same means to
