Abdominal deliveries in Africa: food for thought to scholars of the history of medicine.

The purpose of this article is to show the advancement in knowledge of cesarean sections among African traditional healers before the advent of colonialism and introduction of scientific medicine (allopathy) to Africa. The case mentioned below was witnessed by Robert W. Felkin, a Scottish medical anthropologist, in Uganda in 1879. Felkin subsequently wrote a medical dissertation on his observations, which he submitted to Marburg University, Deutsche Reich (now Federal Republic of Germany), in 1885.