Future Prospects for Fetal Surgery

Intrauterine surgery with fetal survival dates from the beginning of this century. Fetuses of the guinea pig (Mayer, 1918) and of the rabbit (Wolff, 1919) survived for several days after being transferred from the uterus to the maternal peritoneal cavity. Surgery on the fetus itself was first performed in 1925; through a small uterine incision, limb amputation was successfully accomplished in the guinea pig (Bors, 1925) and normal delivery of viable offspring followed ablation of an eye, leg or tail in the rat (Nicholas, 1925). Since these early beginnings a wide variety of surgical techniques have been used on several species of animals with varying degrees of success. Procedures such as spinal cord section (Hooker and Nicholas, 1930) adrenalectomy (Tobin, 1939), gonadectomy (Moore and Bodian, 1940; Jost, 1946) and decapitation (JFoote and Foote, 1949; Domm and Leroy, 1951) have been carried out on mammals such as rat, rabbit, guinea pig, opossum and hamster.