Silencing "savage" soundscapes: hearing C-section births in the British imperial record

Abstract

Birth by c-section is often as assumed to be the quieter option for delivery. Yet the possibility of receiving pain medication sufficient to numb the highly invasive incision is only relatively recent. Indeed, it is only in the twentieth century that the mother would reliably survive, and even more recently that she would experience the operation without significant, life-threatening pain. Thus, the sonic history of the c-section is a traumatically turbulent one—the operation was historically performed only if a woman in labor was going to die if no interventions were taken. And yet, soundscapes of surgical births have been even less written about than the sounds of “natural” delivery, rendering the trauma of c-section delivery even further repressed in medical history and cultural memory.

This article aims to address that imbalance, proposing that British imperialist forms of medical writing participated in the silencing of c-section deliveries for women in colonial contexts. According to several written accounts, the “first” successful c-section operation performed in the British empire was conducted by the Irish transgender surgeon Dr James Barry in South Africa sometime between 1815 and 1821. The traditional Barry narrative is that he “brought” the technology of the c-section to Africa, but existing reports from a British doctor touring central Africa actually show that Indigenous Ugandans had already been practicing their own c-sections themselves: in 1884, Robert W. Felkin describes an 1879 journey where he saw an Indigenous Ugandan healer lifting up a knife and “muttering an incantation” over it before cutting into a woman in labor, who then survived. I situate western projected fantasies of colonial sound about the Ugandan “incantation” within a broader framework for critiquing the idea of the “silent, sterile western c-section.”

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ORCID for Erin Johnson-Williams: orcid.org/0000-0002-3305-5783

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