| Myth: The Caesarean section procedure ultimately derives its name from Julius Caesar, who is often (falsely) claimed to have been the first baby born via Caesarean.
It’s hard to pinpoint where exactly this story started, though a 10th century document is the likely culprit. The Suda, a Byzantine-Greek historical encyclopaedia, is one of the earliest records citing Caesar as the namesake of the Caesarean section, stating,
The emperors of the Romans receive this name from Julius Caesar, who was not born. For when his mother died in the ninth month, they cut her open, took him out, and named him thus; for in the Roman tongue dissection is called ‘Caesar.’
We now know that this account is incorrect on several points. First of all, babies had been cut from their mother’s wombs in numerous cultures long before Caesar was around. In fact, this was actually part of imperial law in Rome known as the Lex Caesaria. The law, established in the time of Numa Pompilius (715-673 BC, well before Caesar’s time), stated that if a pregnant woman died, the baby had to be taken from her womb.
The second point that The Suda gets wrong is on Caesar’s mother- she did not die in childbirth. Aurelia Cotta survived to see her son to adulthood and acted as one of his political advisers. Some historians even believe that she survived him.
As Aurelia did not die in childbirth, it is extremely unlikely that she underwent a Caesarean section. As noted, at the time, the operation was used as a “last resort” method of trying to save the baby’s life. As far as historians can tell, nearly all- if not all- operations ended in the mother’s death in those days. This was likely due to unsanitary conditions which led to infection, as well as haemorrhaging resulting in too much loss of blood.
In fact, the procedure faced an extremely high mortality rate well into the 19th century and the first known successful C-section—one in which both the mother and child survived—wasn’t performed until the late 16th century in Switzerland. Funny enough- not performed by any sort of doctor, but by a pig gelder (castrater) who operated on his own wife. However, this instance wasn’t well documented, so take it with a grain of salt.
The first known such successful operation where the mother survived in Britain didn’t occur until the early 1800s and in America just shortly before that. And even in 1865, the survival rate for a woman having a C-section was only 15%. So it’s very unlikely that if Aurelia did have a C-section about 1000 years before and survived, that her unique accomplishment slipped through the pages of history unnoticed. That’s not even considering the fact the a C-section wouldn’t have been done until physicians was sure she was going to die anyway. So she’d have had to dually survive whatever they had thought was going to kill her and then the procedure.
Much more compelling is the fact that the term for the babies cut from the womb after the mother died was “caesones”. This seems to be yet another very likely origin for the later “Caesarian Operation” that became “Caesarian Section” in 1598 when Jacques Guillimeau published a book detailing the work of midwives.
Culled from: Today I Found Out
I share all of this trivia with you so that you might not get misled by the fibbing beginning of this next feature… |
