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Topic: Caesarean

The history of caesarean surgeries is, at best, only poorly understood. According to some histories, it was on this date in 1794, that one Doctor Jesse Bennett performed the first ever successful Caesarean section in the United States. The patient? His wife. We don't know if that surgery was indeed the first in America, but we do know how success was measured: not by the infant's survival, but by the mother's.

In the years before aseptic practices (and antibiotics) were an established part of medicine, childbirth mortality rates were frighteningly high, and caesarean surgery was a last ditch effort confined to dying (or dead) pregnant women. In fact, one theory for the name caesarean traces it back to Lex Caesare, a Roman law requiring that babies be taken from the womb in such circumstances. However, there's no evidence to support this theory.

Another theory advanced by Pliny the Elder holds that Caesar (not Julius but an ancestor) came by that name because he was a caeso matris utero —cut from the womb of his mother. As you may have guessed, this explanation is greeted as skeptically as the first.

Finally, there is the theory that the caesarean recognizes Julius Caesar, allegedly born by this method. This is the account accepted by most dictionaries even though the survival of Caesar's mother for decades after his birth calls the historical basis of the explanation into question.

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