September, 1st, 2020
Over the course of the twentieth century the cesarean operation became an increasingly common procedure. In the eighteen century, however, the operation was performed almost exclusively on women already deceased.
Our main goal was to provide readers—primarily undergraduates students though graduate students and faculty as well—with the first English-language translation of Arrese’s text, which was beautifully rendered from the original Spanish by Dr. Nina M. Scott. We were particularly interested in Arrese’s text because it was both readable and short, especially in comparison to other postmortem cesarean treatises published in Spain and throughout its colonies. Although the language itself is complicated, the text is organized around a rhetorical device known as hypophora, in which the questioner answers his or her own question. The body of the text, in its question-and-answer format, thus reads as a dialogue that engages a whole range of medical and theological questions about life, death, surgery, duty, sin, baptism, and salvation that were pressing issues in the late eighteenth century. In this sense, while the text may focus on a peculiar topic, it speaks volumes about the nature of colonial society in Guatemala and elsewhere during the final decades of Spanish rule.
The text also emphasizes a diverse range of themes including women’s morality, gender, religious devotion, priestly morality, and medical expertise. One fabulous example is how Arrese’s text constructs and interprets gender. In Section IV of the text, he cites, for instance, as some of the root causes of women’s miscarriages “a woman’s lack of good judgment”; “lack of moderation and but little care of her health during the pregnancy”; “dances, which lead to agitation” and lead her “to abandon the modesty and restraint so characteristic of her sex”; “very tight dresses”; and, among other things, “harmful breezes, noxious breaths.” Such understandings of the causes of miscarriage allow present-day readers to step back and frame Arrese’s text, which is primarily about the need to baptize fetuses of deceased would-be mothers, in terms of larger colonial anxieties and imperial ideologies about women’s bodies, regulating pregnancy and women’s access to abortion, and constructing the fetus—especially that of recently converted Indigenous women—into a colonial subject. Performing cesareans on deceased female bodies for fetal baptism was thus a product of both medical and theological debates that took place throughout the empire as well as at the local level. The operation was intended to serve spiritual ends along with the larger goal of maintaining and propagating an empire managed by ruling elites, in part, by trying to ensure that the souls of colonized subjects’ infants would be eternally brought into the fold of Catholicism. We also found the variety of practices and liquids used in baptism itself fascinating. In the absence of holy water, all kinds of liquids including ink, rose water, broth, bleach, and beer could be used with the Church’s approval!
Perhaps most importantly, we hope that Baptism Through Incision reveals to undergraduate students that ideas about the fetus have never been stable; instead, they have shifted dramatically over time and have been shaped by concerns in earlier periods that differ from those that inform current debates. What struck us the most about Arrese’s text and other materials included in translation was the variety and ambiguity of terminology used to describe a fetus versus a baby. Today, in English, we make very stark distinctions between the idea of the “fetus” as inhabiting the womb and the “baby” or “infant” existing outside the womb. In eighteenth-century Spanish, however, the term for fetus (feto) could refer to a fetus either inside or outside of the womb. Similarly, the term criatura, which in modern Spanish is equivalent to “child” or “infant” in English, could refer in the eighteenth century to a fetus, a baby, an infant, or a child. We thus had to be very attentive to context in our translations and decided early on not translate either term as “child,” as some scholars have done.
In this sense, the eighteenth-century works by Arrese and others that depict the fetus as alive, ensouled, and requiring salvation through baptism do not reflect immutable, widely accepted truths within Catholic societies or even the Catholic Church itself. Instead, they were preceded by ancient legal texts and works in medieval Christendom based on precedent, in which authors neither described the fetus as alive nor considered it to be a being separate from the mother’s body. Questions of legal standing, inheritance, and salvation generated different ideas about the fetus in different historical and cultural contexts. Arrese’s treatise and the other texts included in this Baptism Through Incision thus reflect a particular moment of debate in a longer, gradual process of characterizing and recharacterizing the fetus according to shifting criteria. This process, moreover, did not move in a linear direction over time, nor did it ever lead to consensus about how the fetus should be understood in any sort of transhistorical fashion. We show our readers that this is still the case in debates about how we perceive and depict the fetus today. Recognizing that these ideas are always locally situated and historically contingent can help us understand the complicated nature of reproductive politics in both the past and present with greater nuance.
Where do you see your research project going from here?
Our larger project, building off Baptism Through Incision, seeks to trace and analyze the rise, spread, and eventual decline of the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial worlds and in the nineteenth century. It will be a full-length scholarly monograph aimed at a more specialized audience, one that engages in a multi-sited analysis of the procedure’s adoption, adaptation, transformation, and rejection among different populations. The project centers on the postmortem cesarean operation texts that emerged in the eighteenth century from the key works by Cangiamila and Rodríguez, and that were then read and reworked for local needs in Spain and in colonial Spanish America—places like Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala– through the end of the colonial period and up to the mid-nineteenth century. We are widening the temporal lens as well to consider the ways that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century confessional manuals and other religious materials related to pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and infanticide informed and shaped the justification for the procedure, especially in colonial settings. Last but not least, we look to uncover the ways that postmortem cesareans informed and connected to modern understandings and practices of cesareans through an analysis of medical theses in Latin America, Spain, and the Philippines.
We were lucky that our ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship enabled the three of us to travel (both together and independently) to historical archives, medical collections, and rare books libraries in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and the United States. The research funds also allowed us to commission translations of Indigenous-language postmortem cesarean manuals and related materials—including colonial dictionaries, grammars, and confessional manuals—from Nahuatl (in central Mexico), Yucatecan Maya (in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula), and Quechua (in the Andes). One place that received relatively little attention in Baptism Through Incision, and that will receive greater attention in the monograph, is the Spanish colonial Philippines. We, for instance, recently commissioned and received English translations of a key text—“Duties that should Rightfully be Fulfilled and Committed by All Men of Right Reason, to be followed Strictly and Completely in the [Matter of] Opening up of Women Dying of Pregnancy”—written on this topic in Cebuano (or Visayan) and published in Manila in 1862. The text is fascinating and helps extend the geographic and temporal arcs of the project. So too do a growing corpus of increasingly secular nineteenth-century medical theses on topics ranging from miscarriage and abortion to the cesarean operation, though now with the goal of fetal survival (and with no mention whatsoever of fetal baptism).
Finally, baptismal and death records, millions of which have been digitized and made available on FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org), a nonprofit organization and website offering genealogical records that is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of notions of life, death, reproduction, and childbirth throughout the Iberian Atlantic (and Iberian Pacific) worlds as they relate to pregnancy, baptism, and the complicated history of the cesarean operation from the sixteenth century to the present. Our ultimate goal is to provide the first comprehensive study of the postmortem cesarean operation in the Iberian world, one that accounts for the variety of historical actors’ experiences of the operation’s use.
How to cite this interview:
FEW, Martha; TORTORICI, Zeb; WARREN, Adam. Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire. In: Revista História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos (Blog). Published on September, 1st, 2020. Accessed in [date].
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