Dr. James Barry - Her Success with a Caesarean

 

📜 Diary Entry: Dr. James Barry

Date: November 30th, 1826
Location: Cape Town, South Africa

The child lived. The mother too.

God help me, I did not expect to write such a line in this godforsaken colony. But I have—by science, by steadiness, by sheer stubborn refusal to allow either woman or babe to die under my knife—I have. And I do not yet know whether I am pleased or merely emptied.

The woman was a washer’s wife, and labor had taken her to the edge of life itself. Her pelvis—narrow, calcified, not capable of delivering the infant naturally. The midwife had already resigned her to death. I was fetched only because they wanted a "gentle passing." They have not met me, evidently.

The decision was clear. I ordered clean linens, boiled instruments, barked at the manservant to fetch spirits. A crude sedative for the woman—poor soul—screaming, wild-eyed. I made the incision with a new scalpel, slicing through skin, fascia, uterus. The blood came quickly. I kept my hands steady. If I faltered, I imagined the London press calling me a barbarian in breeches.

But I did not falter. The child was breech—I turned it. No heartbeat at first, but then a wriggle. A squall. My God.

A living child from a belly cut open.

No woman has survived such a thing here. Perhaps no one in the Empire has recorded it so.

I stitched the womb with silk thread soaked in spirits, took care not to let my fingers tremble. My assistant nearly fainted—utterly useless. The husband stood outside, knuckles white, praying to a God I do not think he truly knows. The mother—her name is Catharina—I do not know whether she will remember me with fear or awe, or not at all.

I imagine her saying, “A thin red-coated doctor with a voice like a flute, who sliced me like a fish and gave me back my child.”

I am still shaking. Not from the procedure, but from what it means.

They will not believe me in London. Nor will they understand how I—an officer, a surgeon, a person who was never meant to wield either blade or title—could perform such an act. But it is done.

And I feel, in the oddest part of myself, that I have claimed a kind of motherhood, too.

No one must ever know what I mean by that.

– Dr. J. Barry