Medicine: Woman's Ills

Jesse Bennett's wife was having a difficult labor. She thought she was going to die and asked for a Caesarean operation in the hope that her child, at least, might be saved. The doctor attending her refused. But Jesse Bennett was a physician himself. He put his wife to sleep with a whopping dose of laudanum. She lay on planks set across two barrels. One sweep of the knife laid open the abdomen and soon a baby girl was extracted. Before he closed the incision, Dr. Bennett removed both ovaries, remarking that he "would...