Hungarian researchers have found the first evidence of a C-section performed on a deceased mother, according to Discovery News.
Scientists performed a number of tests on the mummified remains, currently on display at the Roemer und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, to determine the cause of death.
C-sections were thought to have been performed in the 18th century, however this latest find is definitive proof of their use during this period.
“Caesarean section was made exclusively on women who had died in childbirth," Ildikó Szikossy, an anthropologist and senior curator at the Department of Anthropology at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, told Discovery News. "Indeed, alive patients could have not survived the operation at that time."
Szikossy and her colleagues found traces of a sharp-edged 5.7 inch long cut, running from the umbilical ring to the pubic symphysis, in one of the 265 natural mummified bodies kept at the museum.
The mummies were uncovered in 1994-1995 from a long forgotten crypt in the Dominican church of Vác, a town 22 miles north of the capital on the eastern bank of the Danube river.