South African Surgeons Separate Twins Joined at Head 17 Months

In an eight-hour operation, a team of 40 South African doctors Tuesday successfully separated 17-month-old twin girls who had been joined at the head.

“The twins have been separated. Both twins are fine and we now have two separate lovely babies,” an ecstatic Dr. Chris van der Heever, superintendent at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto township, told reporters.

The success of the operation, the latest in a series to be performed on Mpho (Gift) and Mphonyana (Little Gift) Mathibela, answered the prayers of thousands in South Africa.

The Baragwanath medical team, headed by Dr. Robert Lipschitz, performed two operations on the girls last October to prepare for Tuesday’s surgery.

The girls share a major blood vessel in their heads, which doctors partially clamped in the earlier operations in hopes that lesser blood vessels would take over the functions of the shared vein.

The twins’ mother, 33-year-old domestic worker Sophie Mathibela, who gave birth to the twins Dec. 7, 1986, spent the night before the operation with the girls and attended a prayer service at the hospital chapel Tuesday morning. About 100 people, mostly nurses and patients, said prayers and sang hymns for the girls.

Van der Heever said it was too early to predict whether the babies would face complications as they grow up.

The girls have a combined weight of 33 pounds. Mpho appears to be developing normally and recently began to speak, while Mphonyana is slightly smaller and does not appear to be as advanced, said officials at Baragwanath, the main hospital in the black township of Soweto outside Johannesburg.