Shakespere's immortal citation of Macduff, "who was from his mother's womb untimely ripped," must have been such a case, possibly crudely done, perchance by cattle-horn.

Pope Gregory XIV was said to have been taken from his mother's belly after her death.
The Philosophical Transactions, in the last century contain accounts of Cesarean section performed by an ignorant butcher and also by a midwife; and there are many records of the celebrated case performed by Jacob Nufer, a cattle gelder, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
By the advent of antisepsis and the improvements of Porro and others, Cesarean section has come to be a quite frequent event, and a record of the successful cases would hardly be considered a matter of extraordinary interest, and would be out of the province of this work, but a citation of anomalous cases will be given.

Baldwin reports a case of Cesarean section on a typical rachitic dwarf of twenty-four, who weighed 100 pounds and was only 47 1/2 inches tall.

It was the ninth American case, according to the calculation of Harris, only the third successful one, and the first successful one in Ohio.

The woman had a uniformly contracted pelvis whose anteroposterior diameter was about 1 1/4 inches.