Caesarean
May 5, 2004
Last week, I read an article about the rising number of Caesarean sections being performed in the UK. Curious as to whether it had anything to do with Caesar, the roman Emperor, I turned to the OED and found this:
Caesarean birth, operation, section, the delivery of a child by cutting through the walls of the abdomen when delivery cannot take place in the natural way, as was done in the case of Julius Caesar.
I was very surprised to learn that Caesarean sections were performed as early as 100 B.C. However, if you can't trust the OED, who can you trust these days? No one, it seems. After further research, I found contradicting evidence here. Caesar's mother was still alive when he was an adult, and as this dangerous operation would have most certainly resulted in the death of the mother, he probably wasn't born that way.
Then I found on a medical site that the word caesarean originates from Roman law (or Lex Caesarea) where the foetus had to be removed from the body of a dead woman before she could be buried. However, this site tells us that there is no evidence for such an edict. So it seems that the belief that this operation was started under Caesar's reign was enough to name it after him.
The first recorded evidence of a woman surviving a Caesarean section dates from Germany in 1500, when her husband, a pig gelder, performed the operation on her.
Woman's Hour had a feature on caesarian sections recently. The interviewees included a French man, with one of those to-die-for accents. He was lamenting the fact that in Brazil 80% of women have caesarian sections: "what will 'appen if all women 'ave bebes wizout releasing ze cocktail of lurve 'ormones?"
Yes, I think the NHS should have some sort of official policy on encouraging "lurve 'ormones", but somehow it doesn't sound very english, does it?
Posted by Sarah Tryfan on May 5, 2004 10:11 AM"Love hormones"??? What??
I remember reading a comprehensive article written by Naomi Wolf in the Independent last year that was suggesting that women were in fact often encouraged to have Caesarian sections by surgeons (often male) because it's a lot quicker than natural births, with a peak on Friday afternoons...
Posted by céline on May 5, 2004 10:27 AMWell Shakespeare touch on it in Macbeth 'Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped' (Act 5, Scene 8) and when we reached that bit at school there was always a chorus of 'I am Caesarian'....okay a bit lame I think you really had to be there :)
Posted by flaming zinc on May 6, 2004 10:45 PM
"Caesar's mother was still alive when he was an adult, and as this dangerous operation would have most certainly resulted in the death of the mother, he probably wasn't born that way."
Maybe so, but when you consider that trepanning was done by ancient cultures with a fairly high survival rate, who knows?
And then, there was the story recently about a woman in rural Mexico who did a C-Section on herself with a kitchen knife. Both she and the baby lived to tell the tale.
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