Medicine: Twins Under the Skin

In an accident at the U.S. Air Force base in Bordeaux, France two months ago, Specialist 3/c Rodney Madeira, 20, suffered third-degree burns over 30% of his body, with lesser burns over another 10%. He faced a long and dangerous period in the hospital while growing the skin he needed to cover the burned area.

Flown to the Air Force hospital at Wiesbaden, Germany, Madeira was swathed in dressings of erythromycin (an antibiotic) on fine-mesh gauze. In a month his wounds had healed enough for the doctors to start skin grafts. They covered 20% of the burned area with skin from Madeira’s left arm, then began looking around for a new source of supply. It was unfortunate, Chief Surgeon Major Philip A. Cox remarked to Madeira, that he did not have an identical twin, since only skin from the patient’s own body or from such a twin would do for a permanent graft. Replied Madeira: “I have one.”

Major Cox fired off a teletype message to Washington. Four days later, as he was sitting down to lunch in Munsan, Korea, Army Cook Charles Ronald Madeira was told that he had emergency leave, in 15 minutes had started on the first leg of his trip to Germany. On the way, Charles Madeira, who had not seen his brother since they left their home town, Reading, Pa., a year and a half ago, had some reservations (“They ain’t hacking off none of my skin for nobody”). Later he decided to go through with the operation: “He’d do the same thing for me—I hope.”

In Wiesbaden, Major Cox decided on the basis of preliminary evidence that Rodney and Charles were, indeed, identical twins. (He will not be positive until the grafts have been given enough time to take. Normally, because the skins of different individuals have biological differences, grafts from one person to another wither and disappear within 30 to 60 days, although they have temporary value as a protective covering.) The twins were wheeled into separate operating rooms. Surgeons took from Charles’ thighs and lower legs twelve strips two in. wide, 12 to 14 in. long and thirteen-thousandths of an inch thick, grafted them on to the burns on the lower part of Rodney’s body. Five days after the operation 95% of the graft apparently had taken.

Although doctors cannot yet be sure whether the operation will be a permanent success, they can point to some encouraging, if rare, precedents in recent years. In 1952 Army Private Leonard Kijowski donated skin to twin brother Leo (TIME. Feb. 4, 1952), and both made good recoveries. Last summer Major Cox treated an airman suffering from third-degree burns over 45% of his body area, saved his life when he chanced to spot his twin brother wandering around the hospital corridor.