Nufer's wife
Nov. 12th, 2010 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI'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.
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.
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Maybe the first documented Western C-section...
Date: 2010-11-13 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: Maybe the first documented Western C-section...
Date: 2010-11-13 07:00 pm (UTC)http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/part1.html
This whole story stinks the more I look at it. There is absolutely _nothing_ about the Nufer story more compelling than the Rustam story or, for that matter, the Julius Caesar story which gives the procedure its name. Aurelia supposedly survived it; we just unilaterally concluded at some later point that she couldn't possibly have and therefore it wasn't _really_ a c-section. This is right up there with "Troy didn't really exist".
Do you remember the name of the Arabic medical text?
Re: Maybe the first documented Western C-section...
Date: 2010-11-13 11:43 pm (UTC)"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...
Date: 2010-11-14 02:38 am (UTC)http://www.ummah.com/history/scholars/c_section/
This is remarkably fascinating stuff.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-14 09:10 pm (UTC)Re the birth of Julius Caesar: I think the problem with his mother being alive years later is that many of the medieval descriptions of his birth state specifically that he was cut from her dead body (which obviously can't have been true), and that Roman law required that an attempt be made to save the child by surgery in the case of a mother dying or appearing near death before the child was born. And anyway I don't think it's impossible that a woman in that situation could have survived, but in a fairly well documented family you would think some contemporary would have gotten her unusual recovery story straight (or even exaggerated it), rather than it being quite forgotten. I think it's reasonable to put the birth story in the same category with the Renaissance accounts of Vergil as a magician.
Pliny the Elder speculated that the Caesar name came from an *ancestor* of Julius having been so born.
"Caesar - A hereditary surname of the patrician Julii with several different, presumed meanings. The most likely is derived from the Latin word caesaries, meaning "hairy; possessing a head of hair" and possibly referring to the original Caesar having been born with a full head of hair. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History (Book 7), is responsible for the enduring belief that the family derived their name from another Latin word implying that the first of the Caesones had been cut from his mother's womb (a story which is the source of the medical term "Caesarian section")." http://www.unrv.com/culture/surnames-of-the-julii.php