The first Cesarean operations were done to extract a dead fetus from a dead mother.  Numa Pompilius (715 - 672 BCE), a legendary king of Rome forbids burying a dead woman until her baby was taken out of her.  Early Christians believed that: "He who does not bury the baby causes the promise of life to perish with the mother!"  No one survived the operation in Paris between 1787 to 1876 when the procedure was done on 24 living patients.  The surgical knife shown is unplated steel with ivory handle used around 1860.
 

     The operation's name probably goes back to the eight Century BCE.  Numa Pompilius (715 - 672 BCE), a king of Rome forbids the burial of a pregnant woman before the young has been excised.  The law continued under the Caesars when it acquired the name Lex Caesare.  Some scholars believed that the name was derived from the Latin word Caedere, meaning to cut.  In 1867, there were 54% maternal deaths out of 1,605 operations done in the United States.
     The photo is a scalpel made of unplated steel with smooth ebony handle used circa 1860.

Childbirth during the medieval times took place on a stool or in the lap of another woman. 

During the Civil War 1861- 1865, medicine barely rosed up  from its medieval period.  Amputation was the only reasoned  treatment for gun shot wound, severe laceration, severly infected limb, or fracture .  Amputation accounted for 75 % of all the surgeries done during the civil war.  Records showed more or less 30, 000 amputations were  performed on the Union side  with more than 25 % mortality.  Few doctors knew how to administer ether or chloroform although available and  the principle of antisepsis was unknown.  Surgery was performed with bare unwashed hands in the open fields.  The surgeons used the same amputation kits,  rubbing them between cases  with  a piece of dirty rags.

Medical instruments from the end of the 19th century through early 1900's, include descriptions of "pessaries" that resemble modern IUD (Intrauterine device).  The existence of Comstock laws that prohibit the use of the mails for contraceptive devices may have been the reason for the false advertisement.
Anthony Comstock was an anti-sin crusader whose activities resulted in the passage of the 1873 federal postal law prohibiting the propagation of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the U.S. mail.  He labeled contraceptive methods  as "lewd, lascivious, and obscene," that he burned  tons and tons of contraceptive materials.  In 1930, a U.S. federal court declared  the Comstock law unconstitutional.