Caesarean Section

Caesarean section, delivery of a baby through an incision in the mother's abdomen and uterus, has ancient roots in several cultures: the Chinese Records of the Grand Historian describes a birth by cutting open the body around 1030 BC, the Sanskrit Sushruta Samhita mentions post-mortem versions, and Persian literature attributes one to the legendary birth of Rostam. The popular belief that Julius Caesar himself was born this way is considered false: the procedure was lethal to mothers in ancient Rome, and Caesar's own mother, Aurelia Cotta, lived until he was an adult; the Roman writer Pliny the Elder theorized that an ancestor of Caesar's was born this way and the family name derived from it, but the truth of that etymology is debated. Until the modern era, caesarean section was almost invariably fatal to the mother; the first recorded case in which both mother and child survived is said to be a 1500 operation in Switzerland performed by the pig-gelder Jacob Nufer on his own wife. The operation became reliably survivable only with 19th and early 20th century advances: Ferdinand Adolf Kehrer's transverse lower-segment incision technique (1881), Max Sanger's method of suturing the uterus closed (1882), Hermann Pfannenstiel's incision modification (1900), and the later introduction of anesthesia, asepsis, antibiotics and blood transfusion.