medical personnel involved in the operations. In the context of the 1950s it was medical communication rather than surgical separation that was considered controversial, unethical and in need of regulation.

The Kano and Keighley cases open up a number of interesting questions about British medicine in the early years of the NHS. In what ways did the new service, and its nationalized hospitals, impact on the nature and development of medicine\'s professional ethics, or on relations between the medical profession and the popular press? These questions were raised in debates about press coverage of the twins; it was the popular representation of these cases that became the source of controversy and a site for mobilizing claims about ethical behaviour. Matters of communication, information-control and "image-management" were therefore an importantand potentially problematic aspect of the new service. These questions are examined here through a range of documents, including press reports, the minutes of a confidential enquiry into the press coverage convened by the British Medical Association (BMA), oral and written testimony supplied to the enquiry, and accounts written after the event by key participants. The controversy over the representation of these cases emerges as an important episode in the development of the relationship between medicine and the media in post-war Britain, and highlights the distinction accorded to doctors and hospitals as sources of "medical news" due in large part to claims about confidentiality.

The spectacle and secrecy aroused by the two operations opens up an area which is best analysed through a number of overlapping frames. Sociological analyses