Jacob Nufer performs the first recorded cesarean birth with both mother and baby surviving

Story: 1500 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 13, 0001

Sometime around 1500 C.E., a Swiss pig gelder named Jacob Nufer allegedly did something no surgeon of his era had managed to do: he cut open his wife’s abdomen to deliver their child, and both of them lived. Whether the story is literally true or not, it marks a turning point in how medicine would eventually think about one of birth’s most dangerous emergencies.

What the record shows

• Cesarean birth survival: According to the historical account, Nufer’s wife had been in labor for days and thirteen midwives had failed to help her — Nufer obtained permission from local authorities to attempt a surgical delivery himself.
• Jacob Nufer’s background: As a professional pig castrator, Nufer had direct experience with animal anatomy and cutting — likely the basis for his decision to attempt what trained physicians had not.
• Maternal outcome: The account claims his wife not only survived but went on to deliver five more children naturally, including twins — a detail historians note strains credibility and may reflect later embellishment.

Why survival was almost unheard of

Before 1500 C.E., cesarean sections were performed almost exclusively on women who had already died or were dying, with the sole goal of saving the child or, in Catholic Europe, enabling a separate baptism. The operation on a living mother was considered a death sentence.

Infection, hemorrhage, and the absence of any effective anesthesia made abdominal surgery catastrophically dangerous. The few surviving records of cesarean procedures before the 16th century show virtually no maternal survivors. Even skilled physicians avoided the operation on living patients.

That a non-physician — working with tools designed for animals, not people — would attempt this, and that the account claims success, is why the story lodged itself in medical memory. It circulated through European medical literature for centuries as evidence that survival was at least conceivable.

How the story traveled through medicine

The Nufer account was not written down until 1581 C.E., roughly 82 years after the event supposedly occurred. A French surgeon named François Rousset recorded it in a treatise arguing that cesarean section could and should be performed on living women. Rousset had an agenda: he was trying to persuade a skeptical medical establishment.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the story was invented, but it does mean it passed through at least one very motivated filter before reaching us. Still, the account became widely cited across Europe, and it helped shift medical opinion — gradually and unevenly — toward the idea that the operation might be survivable.

Parallel developments were happening elsewhere. Surgeons in the Arab world, drawing on earlier Greek and Roman anatomical knowledge, had been refining abdominal surgical techniques for centuries. Indigenous midwifery traditions in parts of Africa and the Americas had developed sophisticated interventions for obstructed labor — some of which European medicine would not formalize for generations. The story of birth medicine is far wider than any single European account.

Lasting impact

The Nufer account, real or embellished, helped build a conceptual bridge that medicine eventually crossed. By the 19th century C.E., advances in anesthesia, antisepsis, and surgical suturing transformed the cesarean from a last resort into a viable procedure. Today, cesarean sections account for roughly 21% of all births globally, and in high-resource settings they save hundreds of thousands of lives annually.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s history of cesarean section places the Nufer account in the context of a long evolution — one in which individual stories, even uncertain ones, shaped what physicians believed was possible. Possibility, once demonstrated, becomes a kind of permission.

The World Health Organization now tracks cesarean rates globally, noting that while overuse in wealthy settings is a concern, underuse in lower-resource settings still costs lives — a tension that echoes the same basic question Nufer’s story raised: who gets access to this intervention, and when?

The operation’s name itself carries a separate mythology. The word “cesarean” has long been linked to Julius Caesar, but Caesar’s mother lived well past his birth — making the origin story almost certainly false. Most etymologists now trace the term to the Latin caedere, meaning “to cut.”

Blindspots and limits

The Nufer account is the earliest reported case of maternal survival, not a verified one — it rests on a single secondhand source written eight decades later by an author with a clear motive. Many medical historians treat it as plausible but unconfirmed.

The broader history of birth interventions, including those practiced by Indigenous midwives and surgeons in non-European traditions, remains poorly documented in Western medical records — not because those traditions were less sophisticated, but because they were less likely to be written down and preserved in archives that survived. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists acknowledges this gap in its own historical reviews. What we call “the first” is often really “the first written account we have preserved.”

And even today, access to safe cesarean delivery is deeply unequal. In some regions, women still die from obstructed labor for lack of surgical care. The gap between what medicine knows how to do and who medicine actually reaches remains one of the defining challenges in global health.

Read more

For more on this story, see: U.S. National Library of Medicine — The History of Cesarean Section

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
• Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
• The Good News for Humankind archive on the early modern era

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