THE CAESAREAN SECTION

Caesarean section is a complicated chirurgical operation which consists in making an incision in the uterus in order to extract the foetus. It aims to guarantee the survival of a child when a difficult labour arrives, because of a non cephalic presentation of the foetus, because of an inadequate anatomy of the mother, or because of any other circumstances. In the Middle Ages, it did not aim to guarantee the survival of the mother, because successful caesarean section barely happened. In fact, caesarean section was made almost always postmortem, that is to say when the mother had already died. Nevertheless, caesarean section was essential to make possible the baptism of Christian creatures. Thus, if we keep in mind the great number of adversities in labour and the general concern about baptism among Christian people, we could suppose that caesarean section must have been a frequent chirurgical operation. However, almost neither in the Late Antiquity, nor in the Early Middle Ages and in Romanesque period, caesarean section appears in documentary or material sources. It was mentioned almost neither in Christian medical treatises, nor in Christian theological texts and it was not depicted in works of art. Moreover, it was frequently omitted in Jewish and Muslim scientific documents, something that is not surprising since baptism was not a justification for caesarean section among these religions.