We live today in a strange moment in which new protocols, new health professionals and even future fathers and mothers are advocating for a delivery style less controlled by technology than it has been a few years ago, because it is being seen that the result is better, and also the satisfaction of the woman who gives birth. We are talking about a time when we have not only set the parking brake, but we are pulling back a little because it has been seen that excess medical control is counterproductive.
On the other side of the scale is the beginning of all this, when science had advanced very little in medical care and maternal and fetal mortality was much higher. For example, what happened when a woman needed a C-section? Well, what we can see today thanks to these two illustrations that show how caesarean sections were performed when operated without anesthesia.
Caesarean sections in the year 1840
They are illustrations of the Wellcome Collection from London that we have seen in the DailyMail and that are part of 19th century surgery books, when it was not yet operated with anesthesia. Imagine how dangerous the intervention could be for both the mother and the baby and, obviously, the pain for her.
The two illustrations, this one and the one below, date from 1840, and it was not until 1846 when the first intervention with the administration of an anesthetic was carried out. It was William Morton who conducted it in a public demonstration in which he used ether as an anesthetic administered by inhalation to extract a dental piece whose pain was such that the patient did not hesitate to be the first person to be operated in that way.
A mortality of more than 80%
Caesarean sections were obviously done only in case of emergency (Now they are much safer, but they should continue to be performed under the same premise, as they are still more dangerous than a vaginal birth), since the pain was terrible and the complications too numerous. Think that by then there was not the same hygiene: the hands of the drawings do not wear gloves and probably had not even been washed before the intervention, since it was not until 1843 that they began to think about the possibility that many infections were through the hands of the professionals of the medicine, and think that there were no antibiotics either no way to solve many of the complications that resulted from the intervention.
More than 80% of the people intervened died after the intervention or hours or days later due to infections and / or hemorrhages.
So yes, we can already give thanks to live in the present times, but without getting too excited. We have to keep paying attention to common sense, the one that tells us that Natural childbirth is the safest for mother and baby but that, when there is an emergency, caesarean section can save both of their lives, luckily, because they are no longer done as they were two centuries ago.
