Jacob Nufer

Jacob Nufer (fl. 1500), sometimes given as Jacques Nufu or as James Nufer, was a Swiss swineherd and pig gelder (a person who castrates pigs) who in 1500 may have performed one of the earliest successful Caesarean sections on a living woman who survived. The woman, his wife Elisabeth Alespachin, had been in labour for multiple days. Both Alespachin and the baby boy recovered quickly afterward; Alespachin went on to bear five or six more children, and the boy lived to 77. Nufer's procedure was first related in the 1580s by Caspar Bauhin. Historians have doubted whether the operation occurred as Bauhin described, and have speculated that Alespachin may have instead been carrying an extrauterine pregnancy.