The Christian church father Tertullian accused Hippocrates of possessing one of the brutal instruments designed to dismember a fetus in a breech birth. Although no surviving Hippocratic treatise has instructions on this procedure, it was performed in those years to save the life of the mother. One Hippocratic work, Nature of the Child, describes the procedure of abortion by manipulation called Lacedamonian leap in the case of a six-day-old-embryo: “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap [for] . . . seven times”; after this, “there was a noise; the seed fell out on the ground” . . . “as though someone had removed the shell from a raw egg.”

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The Christian church father Tertullian accused Hippocrates of possessing one of the brutal instruments designed to dismember a fetus in a breech birth. Although no surviving Hippocratic treatise has instructions on this procedure, it was performed in those years to save the life of the mother. One Hippocratic work, Nature of the Child, describes the procedure of abortion by manipulation called Lacedamonian leap in the case of a six-day-old-embryo: “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap [for] . . . seven times”; after this, “there was a noise; the seed fell out on the ground” . . . “as though someone had removed the shell from a raw egg.”" in the context of "John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 76-77" to mean that wisdom is timeless.