G astro-hysterotomy. 
421 
we must prepare. The owner must likewise be conditioned, 
and this latter not only requires a large amount of tact and 
a keen appreciation of human nature, coupled with patience, 
or faith in our efforts to restore to usefulness a maimed, use¬ 
less animal. We are apt to realize, when too late, no matter 
how intelligently we have studied the case, nor how much 
skill we may have evidenced in our operation, the only balm 
that can assuage the owner’s grief is a plaster of gold notes. 
But once having a thorough understanding of what the re¬ 
sponsibilities consist of, who is to assume them and under 
what condition ? It is our duty to spare no pains to preserve 
life and to restore to value the patient. 
Gastro-hysterotomv, or the caesarean operation, seems to 
have been practiced as a dernier resort as early as the sixteenth 
century, and indeed earlier, for history relates that Numa 
Pompilius decreed that every pregnant woman that died 
should be opened, and the Senate of Venice enacted that 
practitioners should ’perform the operation on pregnant 
women as soon as they expired. The king of Sicily also de¬ 
creed that the death punishment should be visited on any 
medical man who omitted or refused the operation to any 
woman dying in advanced pregnancy. In 1581, Francis 
Rousset, a surgeon in Paris, published a treatise in which he 
brought numerous people of the possibility of safely per¬ 
forming the cassarean operation on the living mother, and it 
was he who first gave it its present name. After this publica¬ 
tion the operation was frequently performed on the living 
subject, both in and out of France, and history informs us 
not infrequently when it was entirely unnecessary. An in¬ 
stance is cited of a sow-gilder operating successfully on his 
wife ; also of an illiterate Irish midwife, Mary Donally, who 
with a razor operated on a poor farmer’s wife in June, 1738, 
and removed a dead child. Her patient completely recov¬ 
ered, and was able to walk a mile on the twenty-seventh day 
after. Nay, a negress in Jamaica cut herself open with a 
butcher knife, removed her infant, and recovered. 
In Longshore’s “ Obstetrics ” we find several instances of 
the same woman submitting to the operation two and three 
