Medicine & Health
Caesarean section in Bunyoro-Kitara
The problem
In nineteenth-century Europe, caesarean section usually killed the mother; the operation was close to a last resort.
The innovation
A European medical student, Robert Felkin, watched a caesarean performed in Bunyoro in which both mother and child survived, and published a detailed account of the procedure.
How it worked
His account describes banana wine used both to wash the site and to sedate the patient, a midline incision, cautery of bleeding points, uterine massage to contract the womb, and closure with iron spikes bound with bark cloth.
Why it mattered
The described protocol — antisepsis, anaesthesia, haemostasis, closure — corresponds to practice that European surgery was still consolidating.
The legacy
The account is the observation of one witness and is read by historians as evidence of an established local practice rather than an isolated event. The archive records it as documented by a single contemporaneous source.
Sources
Notes on labour in Central Africa (Edinburgh Medical Journal, 1884)
ScholarshipStudies of pre-colonial surgery in East Africa
Scholarship
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