The History of the C-section

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

History Hit

Society, Sex, Scandal, Education, History

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Almost half of births in the UK are delivered via Cesarean section. But when was this operation first performed?

Kate Lister is joined by Hannah Marsh, author of 'Thread, A Cesarean Story of Myth, Magic, and Medicine', to hear how this medical procedure developed, and how it has become safer.

This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

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All music from Epidemic Sounds.

Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, it's me your host, Kate Lister. I'm just jumping in before the episode to ask you for a little favour.
0:07.6	If you are enjoying betwixt, and I hope that you are, we'd love it if you could vote for us for the
0:12.5	Listeners Choice Awards at the British Podcast Awards. If you follow the link in the show notes,
0:17.9	it should take you to the place you need to go and it would mean the world to us. We were shortlisted last year and the one before that and the one before that.
0:27.8	We were so close and it just made us want it even more. I think we can do it this year. Right on with
0:34.8	the show. Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening
0:39.3	to Betwicks the sheets. And at the top of each show, I give you the fair do's warning, where I have
0:44.7	to tell you this is an adult podcast book about other adults about adulty things and an
0:47.8	adulty way covering your age old subjects and you should be an adult too. And we have to give you that because if you keep listening and you get upset, well, fair do's.
0:54.8	We did tell you. And I do have to give you an extra dollar per fair dues today because we are talking about, drum roll please, the history of the C section.
1:03.2	Yeah, so you can imagine what this one's going to be like and it's going to get graphic.
1:07.9	And you just might not want to listen to that today. And this is your opportunity
1:11.4	to turn us off, go and listen to the archers and just come back to us when we're on safer
1:15.9	territory. Right. On with the show. We are in Switzerland at the start of the 16th century, in the middle of the countryside, no less.
1:30.1	I am a long way from home, both in time and place, I'm not going to lie.
1:33.9	And amongst the stench of livestock and the annoying bugs swarming around, something significant, something historic, is taking place in a cottage over there.
1:41.6	Elizabeth Nuffer is struggling in childbirth. Yikes. And normally,
1:46.3	ah, that's not good news. That's not good news at all for the mother or the child. However,
1:51.5	her husband, Jacob, happens to be a pig gelder by profession and is a dab hand with a sharp
1:57.5	knife. Huh. Okay. Did Elizabeth and her midwives trust him when he said that he could
2:02.8	cut the baby out of his wife? Did anyone really have much choice? Well, what happened next,
2:08.3	if it's to be believed, was one of the first successful cesarean sections documented in history
	...

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