with successful terminations as regards both
mothers and children. Rosenberg tabulates a number of similar cases
from medical literature.

Cases of Cesarean section by the patient herself are most curious, but
may be readily believed if there is any truth in the reports of the
operation being done in savage tribes. Felkin gives an account of a
successful case performed in his presence, with preservation of the
lives of both mother and child, by a native African in Kahura, Uganda
Country. The young girl was operated on in the crudest manner, the
hemorrhage being checked by a hot iron. The sutures were made by means
of seven thin, hot iron spikes, resembling acupressure-needles, closing
the peritoneum and skin. The wound healed in eleven days, and the
mother made a complete recovery. Thomas Cowley describes the case of a
negro woman who, being unable to bear the pains of labor any longer,
took a sharp knife and made a deep incision in her belly--deep enough
to wound the buttocks of her child, and extracted the child, placenta
and all. A negro horse-doctor was called, who sewed the wound up in a
manner similar to the way dead bodies are closed at the present time.

Barker gives the instance of a woman who, on being abused by her
husband after a previous tedious labor, resolved to free herself of the
child, and slyly made an incision five inches long on the left side of
the abdomen with a weaver's knife. When Barker arrived the patient was
literally drenched with blood and to all appearance dead. He extracted
a dead child from the abdomen and bandaged the mother, who lived only
forty hours. In his discourses on Tropical Diseases Moseley speaks of a
young negress in Jamaica who opened her uterus and extracted therefrom
a child which lived six days; the woman recovered. Barker relates
another case in Rensselaer County, N.Y., in which the incision was made
with the razor, the woman likewise recovering. There is an interesting
account of a poor woman at Prischtina, near the Servian frontier, who,
suffering greatly from the pains of labor, resolved to open her abdomen
and uterus. She summoned a neighbor to sew up the incision after she
had extracted the child, and at the time of report, several months
later, both the mother and child were doing well.

Madigan cites the case of a woman of thirty-four, in her seventh
confinement, who, while temporarily insane, laid open her abdomen with
a razor, incised the uterus, and brought o