An Opening for the Life

Abstract

The history of cesarean section is a long chain of tragedies for the mother and the baby. Its origins are lost in myth and folklore of ancient civilizations. In ancient and medieval times, the cesarean section was carried out immediately postmortem in order to save the child. The history of cesarean section on a living woman is linked to the developments in medicine and surgery from the Renaissance. But the results were almost always unfortunate for the woman. A fundamental turning point was the intervention designed by Edoardo Porro (1876) to save the mother and the child at the same time. After Porro’s operation, further methodological developments transformed the cesarean section that turned into a conservative procedure leaving substantially intact the possibility of future fertility. So, this operation came in the twentieth century, beginning a story of progress and reduction in mortality up to the current situation that could almost be described as the era of the cesarean section “on demand.”.