The use of anecdotal evidence has been growing as academics promote the concept of using the most recent scholarship on a topic and downplay the use of the original primary sources in continuing analyses. In this paper, the problems of unconfirmed anecdotal evidence will be investigated against a 19th-century paper that is touted to provide evidence of traditional holistic treatments in central Africa and how these can be used in the provision of surgery for complex medicine such as cesarean sections.