Former Surgeon General Looks Back at Hallmark Case Influenced by Rabbinic Law

In late 1977, Dr. C. Everett Koop made national headlines when he performed surgery on a pair of conjoined twins who shared one heart, separating the two infants. But the news didn’t so much center on the operation itself – at the time, Koop, the future U.S. Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, was a famed pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and foremost authority on the phenomenon of conjoined twins – as on the fact that the separation took place only after weeks of debate involving top doctors and one of the generation’s foremost authorities on Jewish law.

For Koop, who related the story of the case to a group of college students at the Chabad-Lubavitch center serving Dartmouth College, the moral issues at stake – the attempt to save just one of the twins’ lives would invariably result in the sacrifice of the other – pushed him into a world where scientific judgment was questioned in the light of religious mandate. Even today, he looks back at the debate as a formative moment.

“I became, like I am tonight, a storyteller,” Koop told the students, all of them alumni and participants in the Sinai Scholars Society at Dartmouth. “I talk about what happened with these girls and what we could have done differently.”

Chabad at Dartmouth director Rabbi Moshe Leib Gray reached out to Koop after his Sinai Scholars class – part of a joint project of the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute and the Chabad on Campus International Foundation – came across a discussion of the case in their examination of the relevance of the Ten Commandments to the 21st century. The class was considering the Sixth Commandment against killing another person not only in the context of murder, but also in the context of some socially-acceptable manifestations of killing, such as dangerous surgical procedures and abortions.

Gray didn’t have far to look for Koop: the graduate of Dartmouth’s class of 1937 remains as the senior scholar at Dartmouth Medical School’s C. Everett Koop Institute.

Koop’s resulting presentation revealed to the students that just as the Talmud and later Jewish sages considered cases similar to such seemingly modern questions as abortion and experimental treatments, those who pondered the fate of the conjoined twins also reached back to Talmudic arguments.

The doctor, who is not Jewish, said that he referred the case to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein at the encouragement of the twins’ parents, who came from noted rabbinical families in Lakewood, N.J. Rabbi Moshe Dovid Tendler, an expert on medical ethics and a friend of Koop’s, also got involved in the case as a son-in-law of Feinstein’s.

Continued at Chabad.org – Examining the Case