The surgery stepped in when a mother was carrying a dead baby. The midwife had to extract the baby from the mother's womb (Hanawalt, 102). The first attempt at this procedure was to administer medicines so the baby would drop or slip out. One of these "medicines" included making the woman sit over a smoldering fire of donkey's dung with the hopes that the baby would be smoked out. Another "remedy" was to have the mother drink the milk of another mother whose baby was born dead (Hanawalt, 102).
The second attempt (assuming the medicine did not work) was to physically extract the child. This was done by securing hooks into the baby with one hand while the other hand was making sure the baby was not "stuck" on anything that would hinder its exit out of the body. Once the child was "hooked" the midwife jerked and pulled with both hands in order to free the mother of this dead baby. If this did not work, as sometimes happened, the midwife would have to cut off the baby's limbs and get the child out piece by piece (Hanawalt, 103).
The last case of surgery happened when the mother was dead and the child survived. The woman would be cut open on her left side because they did not have to bother with the liver then, and the baby was drawn out through the opening in the midsection. This was a procedure known then and today as the Caesarean (Hanawalt, 104).
In conclusion, one can see that the medieval midwives did more than just deliver babies. These midwives took care of pregnant women, delivered their babies, delivered corpses, delivered babies from corpses, and took care of the exhausted mother in the case that she survived.