Two-Headed Dog

In 1955, at a meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society, a sensational exhibit was presented to the assembled guests. On the platform close to the audience, a large white dog was brought in. The dog looked happy, cheerfully wagging its tail, and unintimated by the large crowd of eager guests in front of him. He seemed particularly unconcerned by the unnatural appendage protruding from the side of his neck.

Just a few days before the meet, the dog had undergone a major surgery during which the Soviet scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov had attached to the side of his neck a second head, acquired from a small brown-haired puppy. Both the hound and the decapitated head of the puppy were alive and reacting to stimuli. And even as the surgeons watched, the puppy's head gave the ear of its host a nasty bite. The white head snarled.

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov’s demonstration sent shockwaves through Russia’s medical community, but this was not the first time our Soviet Dr. Frankenstein had ruffled feathers in his quest for medical breakthroughs. In 1937, at the age of only 21 and still a student, the young Vladimir had shocked his professors by creating the first artificial heart, which he successfully implanted into a dog. The dog survived for five hours. After graduation, Demikhov continued his experimental research, eventually performing successful heart and lung transplants, and later, liver and kidney transplantation on dogs and cats. Some of his patients survived for a month. His experiments with bypassing the coronary arteries were more satisfying. Four of the dogs survived for as long as 2 years. One dog operated in 1953 survived for 7 years.

Encouraged by his successes, Demikhov began moving to bolder experiments. In 1954, he performed his most controversial experimental operation, where he grafted the head and forelegs of a small puppy to the neck of a large adult dog.

“When the multiple dog regained consciousness after the operation, the puppy's head woke up and yawned. The big head gave it a puzzled look and tried at first to shake it off,” reports Time.

The puppy's head kept its own personality. Though handicapped by having almost no body of its own, it was as playful as any other puppy. It growled and snarled with mock fierceness or licked the hand that caressed it. The host-dog was bored by all this, but soon became reconciled to the unaccountable puppy that had sprouted out of its neck. When it got thirsty, the puppy got thirsty and lapped milk eagerly. When the laboratory grew hot, both host-dog and puppy put out their tongues and panted to cool off. After six days of life together, both heads and the common body died.