Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/585

 1500) what was believed to be a Caesarian section on his own wife, and delivered a living child. Both mother and child did well; the child growing up to the age of seventy-seven and the mother giving birth to living children, per vias naturales, several times afterward. In this instance it is generally believed that the case was one of abdominal pregnancy and that the wall of the uterus had not been incised.

The first separate treatise on Caesarian section was written by François Rousset, and in it are reported several cases in which the operation was said to have been performed successfully. But both von Siebold and Kurt Sprengel do not seem willing to accept these reports as genuine, and we are therefore compelled to assume that the first trustworthy account of a Caesarian section successfully performed by a Dr. Trautmann of Wittenberg (in 1610) is that given by Sennert in a communication which was printed early in the seventeenth century.

Invention of the Obstetrical Forceps.—After the publication of Roesslin's "Garden of Roses," the book of which I gave a brief sketch on a previous page, nothing worthy of special note was done for a period of several years to advance the existing knowledge of midwifery or even to systematize that which had already accumulated. Then there began to appear evidences of an awakening among those physicians who recognized the importance of this department of medical science, and as a result there were soon placed upon record accounts of two or three advances of real and permanent value. One of the first of these gains, for example, was the revival and general acceptance of the practice of podalic version, or version by internal manipulations,—that is, the operation of changing the faulty position of the foetus in utero in such a manner that the feet shall be the parts which protrude into the vagina. Podalic version—as it appears from the account given by von Siebold—was known to the ancients, both Celsus and Aëtius having described it in their treatises, but it was afterward forgotten or neglected until Ambroise Paré, in 1550, again recommended it in one of his writings. At the