WARNING: blood and gore ahead. Put down your lunch.
These accounts are taken from the book Anomalies and Curiosities of
Medicine by Gould and Pyle, 1896 (in the public domain). This book is
full of fun stories that are told as true but may be apocryphal; I don't
consider myself knowledgeable enough to judge. Anyway, on to the
cattle-horn!
In the introduction they refer to one of their favorite stories from the
book, in a way that makes one suspicious of the overconfidence of
Victorian physicians...
Remarkable injuries illustrate to what extent tissues and organs may be
damaged without resultant death, and thus the surgeon is encouraged to
proceed to his operation with greater confidence and more definite
knowledge as to the issue. If a mad cow may blindly play the part of a
successful obstetrician with her horns, certainly a skilled surgeon may
hazard entering the womb with his knife.
The authors really enjoy this story. They even hypothesize that Macduff
was "from his mother's womb
untimely ripp'd" by... cattle-horn. Anyway, here is the cattle-horn story
as they tell it:
Pigne speaks of a woman
of thirty-eight, who in the eighth month of her sixth pregnancy
was gored by a bull, the horn effecting a transverse wound 27
inches long, running from one anterior spine
to the other (ie, from her backbone all the way around her waist to the
other side of her backbone). The
woman was found cold and insensible and with an imperceptible
pulse. The small intestines were lying between the thighs and
covered with coagulated blood. In the process of cleansing, a
male child was expelled spontaneously through a rent in the
uterus. The woman was treated with the usual precautions and was
conscious at midday. In a month she was up. She lived twenty
years without any inconvenience except that due to a slight
hernia on the left side. The child died at the end of a
fortnight.
A similar case from 1647 is illustrated with an engraving of a bull
tossing
a woman up into the air, with a baby simultaneously falling
down.
There are other stories:
Carhart describes the case of a pregnant woman, who, while in the
stooping position, milking a cow, was impaled through the vagina by
another cow. The child was born seven days later, with its skull crushed
by the cow's horn. The horn had entered the vagina, carrying the clothing
with it.
There are some marvelous cases of recovery and noninterference with
pregnancy after injuries from horns of cattle.
I think we'll pass on the rest of those. Most involve abdominal injuries
in which intestines leave the body and are returned, occasionally with the
use of anaesthetic.
Gould and Pyle also relate tales of cesarean by ox, by cannonball,
and after death.