Case of Abdominal Section in the Sixteenth Century

The triumphs achieved by abdominal surgery of late years lend a special interest to cases in which operations involving the opening of the abdomen were performed by the older surgeons. The case I am going to relate appears to be one of the first in which a surgeon ventured to make an incision into the abdomen for the purpose of removing the remains of an extra-uterine gestation; and it is the more striking as the operation was performed during the existence of a second and natural pregnancy, and the patient recovered without any interruption of the pregnancy, which terminated naturally in due course. I came across it in the voluminous collection of