Edoardo Porro was born in Padua on September 13, 1842 from Anna Maria Cassola and his father Giovanni who had been transferred there as a Land Registry engineer, and he died in Milan on July 18, 1902.

Porro went through his university years without being a student of any particular merit; in fact he barely passed the exam of Human Anatomy, which constitutes the basic foundation of a surgeon, scoring only eighteen over thirty.

[1] After his graduation and after a brief internship at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, instead of devoting himself to the pursuit of his profession, he volunteered as a soldier and doctor under Giuseppe Garibaldi, and followed the revolutionary leader in the cause of Italian unity in the campaign of 1866 in the Tyrol.

He was influenced by his personal and professional relationship in the battlefield with Malachia De Cristoforis, who translated Charles West’s “Lectures on the disease of women” after meeting him in London.

Even though he was tormented by his illness he started a fervent research activity for the Opera Pia di Santa Corona in Milan, putting in a theoretical framework his previous observations on Caesarean section.

On November 24, 1875 he even obtained the appointment of Professor of Obstetrics in the University of Pavia, 'not by the protection of the great or by caprice of fortune, but by the force of true and real merit.

In fact, going against his colleagues, he stood in favor of therapeutic abortions in the most difficult childbirth cases because the only treatment would have been the caesarean cut, resulting in the mother’s death.

The work of Porro attracted the attention of the medical profession in Europe to the achievements of Italian physicians and surgeons to an extent unknown since the schools of Padua and Bologna began to decline.

Until the 1700s the Caesarean section was only practiced on dead women, since the attempt of performing it on a living woman, was invariably followed by her death, as a consequence of the hemorrhagic or septic complications, which characterized the post-operatory course.

[1] In the history of the caesarean section, the work of the Italian obstetrician Eduardo Porro represents a pivotal stage in the development of the procedure in the modern era.

[5] He published the case to the world a few months later in “Della amputazione utero-ovarico come complemento di taglio cesareo”(Milan, 1876), where he describes the operation with analytic precision.