Doctor Chapot-Prévost, surgeon of French origin based in Brazil, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro. On May 30, 1900, in front of a select audience of curious and generally skeptical doctors and surgeons, he separated two little “Siamese girls”, Maria and Rosalina, born in 1893. Very quickly, and despite the death of one of the two girls 5 days after the operation, Doctor Chapot-Prévost became a national hero in Brazil thanks to the press. “The emotion was so great that, to satisfy the public's curiosity, all the newspapers constantly posted bulletins on the condition of the little ones who had been operated on,” he wrote with modesty. The Brazilian parliament even votes for credits to allow the surgeon to make a scientific tour of Europe, with the survivor, in order to present this feat to the old world.
55The operation is presented (and not only by its director) implicitly as a first, whereas as we have seen, this is not the case. This vision is perhaps explained by the fact that it was attempted for the first time on two girls aged 7 years, and not on newborns; also by the fact that previous attempts where it was necessary to cut a flap of liver (as in the operation attempted by Biaudet and Bugnion 20 years earlier) had failed, due to hemorrhage; an operation had also been attempted in 1899 by another Brazilian surgeon on the two girls, but stopped when the surgeon noticed the existence of a hepatic bridge, raising fears of hemorrhage; by the use of a hemostasis process of which the surgeon claims paternity. In addition, Maria-Rosalina would constitute a type of thoraco-xiphopagus with inverted organs, and therefore deemed inoperable according to Dareste's typology; Chapot-Prévost does not fail to emphasize this point, using x-rays if necessary to support his allegations.
56Whatever the case, Doctor Chapot-Prévost enjoys intoxicating glory; he was received by the Academy of Medicine, where he presented Rosalina in October 1900, by the Salpetrière where the little girl was x-rayed, at the Academy of Sciences at the beginning of 1901. He poses as a specialist in Teratopagus surgery, to which he also devoted two brochures of around a hundred pages, published in France in 1901; he reviews famous present and past teratopagos case by case to conclude, almost always, that they are operable; The famous Rosa-Josepha, (not all her colleagues are of her opinion), or even Radica and Doodica, or the Chinese brothers, would thus be subject to his scalpel. Denouncing the greed of barnums or parents, the “public curiosity” which treats them like “wild beasts”, Chapot-Prévost slips into the figure of the liberating surgeon; a sort of new Pinel, providing aid to “creatures who have every right to freedom and independent life”.