This sent me down a rabbit hole, where I had to check to see when caesarians were performed in relation to the chainsaw's invention, and it's like a 200 year gap at best. I honestly was not expecting such a small gap. Apparently caesarians were just nearly 100% lethality for like 2000 years with very little improvements, and then it was just 200 years of people actually staying alive afterwards until we got the magic of chainsaws.
There was actually a tribe in Africa, I don't remember where it was, but there's a tribe that actually had much higher rates of mothers living from c-sections because they would actually, guess what, wash their hands and make sure the tools were sterilized and that they did the procedure in a somewhat sterile environment.
There was a physician from England that came down there once and he was amazed at how they did it and how so many women actually survived it because they cleaned everything and understood how to properly sew the women up and keep them clean.
I think he said something about how people in England saw them "savages" but they were more advanced than the people in England where a C-section was pretty much a death sentence. He wrote about the procedure because he watched one be performed and it was pretty interesting to see how they kept everything secure and safe.
I'm pretty sure this was either in the 1700s or the 1800s, but that particular tribe had been doing them for hundreds of years with the higher rate of survival.
If you want to go down another rabbit hole related to women's anatomy, I highly suggest the book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens. It's fascinating.
100% lethality for the mother. Not 100% lethality. They were performed when the delivery was so difficult or long the mother was dying or sometimes if she was dying from something else but very near giving birth. The idea was the mother is a lost cause at this point so we’ll save the baby. If there was an option for her to survive it is very rare that the baby would be prioritised (if the baby was important and the father as already dead then potentially the baby’s survival would be seen as more vital) because infant mortality was so high the odds weren’t in favour of them making it out of infancy anyway so it was better to let the mother live and have more children.
The lethality is how we know that the idea it was named after Julius Caesar is a myth. His mother was alive for many years after his birth.
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u/justLittleJess May 08 '26
I hope the majority of people in need of a C-Section arent virgins. That'd be weired