Births by cesarean section are so common these days that it is easy to forget what they were like before the advent of modern medicine: desperate gambits to save a baby by sacrificing the mother.

Cesarean births are mentioned in history and literature going back to antiquity, but the severe pain and stress, loss of blood and likelihood of infection usually added up to a death sentence for the woman, if she was not dead already.

When did all that start to change? When and where did both mother and child first survive a C-section?

Would you have guessed medieval Prague in the winter of 1337?

Neither would most historians, until a team of Czech researchers recently found an apparent case at the court of John the Blind, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxembourg.