The Chapel and the Operating Room: The Struggle of Roman Catholic Clergy, Physicians, and Believers with the Dilemmas of Obstetric Surgery, 1800-1900

By 1800, the Roman Catholic Church and organized medicine faced the dilemma of how to resolve cases of obstructed births. American physicians usually practiced destructive operations, like craniotomy, in an attempt to save the lives of mothers. The church allowed such operations after the death of the infant. A new technique of surgery, the cesarean operation, offered hope that both patients would survive childbirth. Medical progress, and an emerging Catholic belief that the fetus was human, prompted Catholic physicians to advocate the new operation, and stirred a renewed debate among European theologians on the propriety of craniotomy. In America, the broad Christian tradition promoted by the Catholic Church began to inform medicine on the moral and ethical parameters of surgery. American physicians, for their part, engaged in their own debate on the propriety of the cesarean operation. This article, focusing on the cesarean debate, reveals the intersections of Catholicism and medical progress amid the growth of obstetric surgery from 1800 to 1900.