Speaker 1: Julius Caesar A commonly touted notion is that Julius Caesar was born via what is now called a Caesarean section after his notable birth, but is this actually true? To begin with, the first known instance of Caesar's birth being noted to be in this manner didn't occur until the 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia the Pseuda, where it reads, The emperors of the Romans received this name from Julius Caesar, who was not born, for when his mother died in the ninth month, they cut her open, took him out, and named him thus, for in the Roman tongue dissection is called Caesar. It turns out, though, that Aurelia Cotta, Caesar's mother, lived all the way to around 54 BC, seemingly dying about ten years before Julius Caesar was assassinated, though some sources do claim she outlived him. Either way, she definitely survived his birth. This is significant, because C-sections up until very modern times were a death sentence. That's not to say they didn't happen. In fact, in Roman law, called Lex Caesarea, it stated that if a woman died, the baby had to be taken from the womb, even if it too was dead. This was established in the time of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, 715-673 BC, hundreds of years before Caesar's time. This was seemingly mostly for religious reasons, but sometimes the baby could be saved in this way, particularly when it was determined that the woman would probably die anyway, such as if she was bleeding a lot or something like that. Thus, they'd sometimes go ahead and perform the procedure while she was still barely clinging to life to at least save the baby. As Aurelia did not die in childbirth, and the only way they'd have performed the procedure was if she was dead or near death, we can be reasonably certain Caesar was not born this way as being near death and then being sliced open in a procedure that seemingly universally killed the woman by itself is generally not a good combination for survivability. Also, Aurelia was no plebeian. She was the daughter of a Roman consul and also the granddaughter of another Roman consul and a member of an extremely prominent family. Had she miraculously survived a C-section, this would have likely been recorded somewhere and certainly contemporary historians documenting Julius Caesar's life would have found this extremely noteworthy. In fact, it turns out that the first known C-section where both the mother and the child survived isn't thought to have been performed until the late 16th century occurring in Switzerland. Funnily enough, it was supposedly not performed by any sort of doctor, but by a pig gelder named Jacob Neufer who operated on his own wife. The story goes that after his wife labored unsuccessfully for a couple of days, he made a single cut in her stomach and took the baby out, and then sewed her up like the pigs he regularly dealt with. The woman supposedly then went on to have five more children, including a set of twins. It should be noted, though, that as the hard documentation to back up this story is pretty scant, some sources question the reliability of this as the first surviving documented account of the story didn't occur until nearly a century after the fact. Moving on to better documented instances, we have to jump across the pond to America where the first known C-section where the woman survived didn't occur until 1794 with Dr. Jesse Bennett performing the procedure on his wife, Elizabeth Bennett, which must have been quite a heart-wrenching thing to do given he would have assumed he was killing his wife in the process of saving their child. Nevertheless, she and the child survived the procedure. An even more interesting and well-documented story is that of the first British surgeon to successfully perform the procedure. This was a person who went by the name of James Barry, but whose birth name was actually Margaret Ann Bulkley- we'll have more on her in the Bonus Facts in a bit. But getting back to Caesar and the C-sections, it's interesting to note that even the Oxford English Dictionary seems to back up the claim that Caesar was born via Caesarean, defining the word as, "...the delivery of a child by cutting through the walls of the abdomen when delivery cannot take place in the natural way, as was done in the case of Julius Caesar." However, giving them the benefit of the doubt here, they may not actually be meaning the ruler of Rome, Julius Caesar. You see, Pliny the Elder noted the name Caesar came from the Latin word for cut, which is sedere. He further stated that one of Caesar's ancestors was born via C-section and was named as such, and that the name was passed down to the eventual ruler of Rome, writing, "...the first of the Caesars was so named from him having been removed by an incision in his mother's womb." And indeed, if you look up his family tree, both Julius and Caesar were common family names, with the first to bear the Caesar name in the Roman ruler's lineage being named Numerius Julius Caesar. So if we're being very generous, it's always possible the OED was referring to this Julius Caesar. Or they're just wrong, which even the best sources, and they are one, sometimes are. Everybody gets stuff wrong, there are no exceptions to this, no matter how hard you try. In any event, as to whether Caesarean section was named after the most famous Julius Caesar thanks to the common misconception here that he was born this way isn't clear, but most etymologists do not think it was the original inspiration, given how common the term and similar ones were before the aforementioned 10th century mention, and given how well known these Latin terms were to physicians throughout the centuries where the term appears to have been established. For example, before this, one term for babies cut from the womb after the mother died was caesone. That said, many still claim it must have been named after Caesar, noting that many languages that use some variant of the Caesarean term sometimes literally translate it as Emperor's Cut. However, again, it's noteworthy that Caesarea in Latin means imperial, and there is the connection with the procedure and the Lex Caesarea among others, so this doesn't necessarily mean the etymology of these various other languages' terms are connected to Julius Caesar himself. So that's the Caesarean part. If you're wondering about the section, that is thanks to a physician named Jacques Guillemot. In his 1598 book on midwifery, he chose to change the name from Caesarean Operation to Caesarean Section and the latter stuck. This is in reference to the Latin sextus, which is past participle of sectare, meaning to cut. Margaret N. Buckley was an Irish woman who, thanks to connections via her then-deceased famed artist uncle, James Barry, became acquainted with a doctor by the name of Edward Friar, who had become her tutor and mentor, a Venezuelan general by the name of Francisco de Miranda, and a man named William Godwin, who happened to be the widower of the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft. At some point, possibly partially due to Margaret's semi-impoverished situation and struggling to get work as a tutor or maybe just because she really wanted to be a doctor, the group got the idea for Margaret to disguise herself as a man so she could attend medical school. She then took the name of James Barry in homage to her deceased famous uncle and officially entered school as his nephew. It has been speculated that her original plan was to eventually resume her original identity and travel with General Francisco de Miranda back to Venezuela, where she would be allowed to work as a doctor, despite being a woman thanks to the general, but this isn't actually clear. Whether there is any merit to this or not, around the time she was graduating medical school in the summer of 1812, not without controversy as it was assumed because of her slight build and high-pitched voice, she must have been lying about her age, though her connection to her famous deceased uncle helped smooth things over, the general was arrested and would later die in prison. So had that actually been the plan, it didn't work out. Whatever the case, what she actually did was keep her assumed identity and join the British Army, though it's unclear how she got past the physical. military sent Barry around the world, Canada, Jamaica, India, and Malta, among others. One of her biggest accomplishments took place in South Africa in 1826. While she was stationed there, she performed a caesarean section on a woman and said woman survived. As mentioned, it was the first known instance of a British surgeon performing the surgery with both mother and child surviving, with the boy child ultimately being named after her. Sort of. He was named Barry. Speaking of things often thought to be named after Caesar, but not really, there's the Caesar salad. This was actually named after a guy called Caesar Cardini, who was an Italian-born chef who immigrated to the United States after World War I. Despite having a home in San Diego, the Cardini family operated a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, primarily because of Prohibition, which resulted in many Americans going to Tijuana to drink, so the restaurant business was booming there. There are various stories surrounding Cardini's inspiration for inventing the Caesar salad. According to Caesar's daughter, on the 4th of July, 1924, Caesar was running short on supplies due to an unexpected rush of customers. In order to not have to turn customers away, he concocted a salad and a dressing out of some of the remaining ingredients he had lying around. Another story by a partner of Caesar, Paul Maggiore, said the Caesar salad was actually made for American airmen from San Diego and was called Aviator's Salad. Caesar's brother, Alex, also claimed that the original name was Aviator Salad, and that he was the one who invented it, not Caesar. Yet another story from a retired airman backs up the Aviator Salad name, but not that Alex Cardini invented it. In his story, he claims that after a long night of drinking, several of the soldiers missed curfew and had to stay at Caesar's restaurant for the night. When they woke up in the morning, Caesar made them a salad, which he called Aviator Salad, and is now today known as Caesar Salad. Whatever the true origin, it is clear that this particular type of salad was made popular at Caesar Cardini's restaurant. As for its spreading, the salad also got a popularity boost when, in 1937, Manny Wolfe, a Hollywood screenwriter for Paramount, began distributing the recipe around to various restaurants in the United States. Caesar Salad's spread to Europe is generally attributed to Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, who was a mistress and eventual wife of Prince Edward VIII of Wales. Simpson often frequented Caesar's restaurant when she was in the area, and during her travels began instructing other chefs how to make it, though she couldn't ever get them to get the dressing quite right, which was a problem in a lot of restaurants that had been serving the salad. As a result of this, by 1948, demand for the dressing for a Caesar Salad became so great that Caesar started Caesar Cardini Foods with his daughter Rosa. With this company, they began selling bottled Caesar Salad dressing.