For four hours, heart surgeons inserted “hair-thin” tubes into their veins and connected them to heart-lung machines that would keep them alive through surgery. On Labor Day 1987, the twins went in for surgery. “But I also knew it would give the boys a chance - their only chance - to live normally.” “After studying the available information, I tentatively agreed to do the surgery knowing it would be the riskiest and most demanding thing I had ever done,” Carson wrote.
Carson, the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the country. But Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was world-renowned for taking on difficult cases and there was Dr. Learning to walk was out of the question. Doctors, however, informed them that should their sons remain joined, they would never be able to sit, crawl or turn over. 2, 1987 although nervous, they loved their babies. Theresia Binder and husband, Josef, welcomed the twins on Feb. Why did I have them separated?” the boys’ mother, Theresia Binder, told the Freizeit Revue, a sister publication of Bunte, in November 1993. Updates on the children were limited after they returned to Germany following the surgery. “But as far as having normal children, I don’t think it was all that successful.” “In a technological ‘star wars’ sort of way, the operation was a fantastic success,” Carson said in an Associated Press article from 1989. The separation of the twins offered long-term benefits for science, but did not result in a happy ending for the Binders. However, Carson himself only occasionally cites and never dwells on the story of Benjamin and Patrick Binder for good reason. The twins did suffer some brain damage and post-operation bleeding but both survived the separation, allowing Carson’s surgery to be considered by the medical establishment the first successful procedure of its kind. On September 4, 1987, after months of rehearsals, Carson and a huge team of doctors, nurses and support staff joined forces for what would be a 22-hour procedure. The operation to separate them to enable them lead their individual lives could be successful, but could also lead to death or leave the pair in a vegetative state. The boys were joined at the back of the head but had separate brains.
At the parents invitation, Carson went to Germany to consult with the family and the boys’ doctors. Patrick and Benjamin Binder were born joined at the head. In 1983, he served a year at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Australia where he gained experience and honed his skills tremendously.Ĭarson returned to Johns Hopkins in 1984 and in 1987 attracted international attention by performing a surgery to separate seven-month-old occipital craniopagus twins in Germany. Carson enrolled in the School of Medicine at the University of Michigan, choosing to become a neurosurgeon.