When giving birth vaginally is n’t an option ( or is n’t the ripe or dependable choice ) , the doctor will cut into an expectantmother’sabdomen and take away thebabysurgically , or else . The procedure is commonly called a coke - section — short for Cesarean subdivision .
It ’s not lose on anyone that the wordCesareanbears a resemblance to the nameCaesar . In fact , earlyspellingsof the term , date at least as far back as the early 17th century , includeCaesareanandCaesarian . And according to the most prevalent hypothesis about its origins , the namesake was indeedJulius Caesarhimself , who purportedly entered the world via carbon - section .
“ [ Caesar ] was rip’t out of his Mothers wombe , at the verie trice she died , ” Gallic surgeon Jacques Guillemeauwrotein his bookChild - birth , or , The Happy Delivery of Women , firstpublishedin 1609 .
There ’s one glare emergence with this theory : Julius Caesar ’s mother , Aurelia Cotta , did n’t become flat in childbirth . Shepassedaway in 54 BCE , just 10 years before her boy ’s murder . And since we have no grounds that anyancient Romanmother survived a C - part — they were typically only perform on women who were already dead or could n’t be carry through — it ’s extremely doubtful that Aurelia Cotta undergo one .
Pliny the Elder present an alternate line of descent account in hisNatural History : That Julius Caesar ’s oldest ancestor was advert Caesar becausehewas issue from his mother ’s womb . In Latin , caesusis a form of the verbcaedere , mean “ to cut . ” ( That say , other people have dissimilar idea about how the nameCaesaroriginated . )
As Lawrence D. Longo and Lawrence P. Reynolds explained in their 2016 mention workWombs with a View , the wordCesareanas it pertains tochildbirthmay have tie to Numa Pompilius , who reign over Rome from 715 to 672 BCE . During his reign , he enacted a constabulary mandating that if a meaning woman die far enough into her term , her baby must be delivered by surgical incision . The law was still combat-ready by the metre the Caesars deal over , so it ’s possible the delivery method do to be associated with — and then named for — Caesarean rule .
The theory are just theory . But even if no Caesar ever had anything to do with a Cesarean surgical incision , the fact that so many important historians and physicians think ( and repeat ) the link between the two is belike why the terminus has stuck to this sidereal day .
