Nufer's wife

[walkitout]

I'm reading _A People's History of Science_, which I'll be posting about (along with some rambling about Spaceship Earth at Epcot) later on. However, I just want to say one thing here.

I'm really kind of tired of hearing about Jacob Nufer, the pig-gelder who did the first "documented" (does that really count when the documentation occurs well after all the participants involved are dead?) c-section in which both the mother and the child survived. I mention it here in part because I find it doubly obnoxious that Conner tells the story without mentioning that the woman in question was Nufer's wife (who else could the woman possibly have been?). The story is also problematic, as it sets up a questionable circumstance in which the moral of the story is that the woman in question and 13 midwives failed, but the pig-gelder delivered. If there's a feminist issue with specifying the marital relationship, there should be a feminist issue with telling the story at all, given the crappy nature of the documentation.

Finally, Europeans traveling in Uganda and Rwanda in the 19th century (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/part2.html) saw a long-standing and successful practice of c-section. We don't know how long that had been going on, but it may well have predated. Given the documentary problems with Nufer, relating Nufer and not mentioning the possibility that African experience was in advance of European practice at a later date smells like Eurocentrism.

Comments

Re: Maybe the first documented Western C-section...

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

There's an early 14th-century illustration discussed here: http://books.google.com/books?id=1HthAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA6

"The picture here reproduced is believed to be the earliest representation of the Caesarian section; it is found in a MS of al-Beruni's al-Athar al-Baqiyah, now no. 161 in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, but previously in the possession of Mr. R. B. M. Binning, of the Madras Civil Service, who purchased it in Ispahan in the year 1851. The colophon bears the date 707 A.h. (= 1307-8 A.d.), and the MS is thus considerably older than any of those used by Professor Sachau in the preparation of his edition of al-Athar al-Baqiyah (Leipzig, 1878). But—unlike the MS described by Professor Salemann in the Bulletin de fAcaddmie Impe'riale des Sciences de St Pe"tersbourg (1912, p. 861 sqq.)—this Edinburgh MS does not supply material for filling up the numerous gaps that occur in Professor Sachau's edition; the arrangement of the text as well as the illustrations would seem to indicate that the Paris MS (Bibliotheque Nationale, Supplement Arabe, Nr. 713, probably about the second half of the 17th century) is ultimately derived from the Edinburgh MS, or that both are copies of a common original; but only a more careful comparison than has been possible to the present writer can determine this question."

(Not going to bother to clean up scannos.)

Re: Maybe the first documented Western C-section...

[walkitout]

Clearly, the standard story is complete bullpucky.

http://www.ummah.com/history/scholars/c_section/

This is remarkably fascinating stuff.