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In 1879, a British/Scottish medical student named Robert Felkin watched an African healer in Uganda perform a caesarean section.
Clean incision. Banana wine as anaesthetic and antiseptic. Bleeding cauterised with hot iron. Wound closed with iron pins and herbal root paste.
Mother recovered fully. Baby survived.
Felkin noted in his journal that the technique was SO REFINED, it was clearly standard practice, performed routinely long before any European arrived.
At that same moment, hospitals in London and Edinburgh were still debating whether caesarean sections could ever be justified on a living woman.
European surgeons were operating in street clothes, rarely washing their hands, and losing most patients to post-operative infection.
The Africans had already solved anaesthesia, anti sepsis, haemostasis, and wound care.
Felkin went home and presented his findings to the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society in 1884.
The knife used in that surgery still exists.
It is now housed in the Science Museum in London.
A silent artifact of a surgical tradition they called primitive.
They didn't discover our medicine.
They witnessed it, wrote it down and forgot to mention where it came from.
Dédáyọ̀ Roots@DedayoRoots
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