Elie Najjar
Nottingham, United Kingdom

Every incision carries two stories. One is written in anatomy. The other—in myth.

In the theatre, the light hums softly above the table, and the air smells of antiseptic and electricity. Beneath the drapes, muscle and bone shimmer like hidden scripture. Surgery, I have learned, is not only science. It is ritual. Memory. Inheritance.

I write these words as a spine surgeon from Lebanon—a land where history is carved in ruins and retold by candlelight, where the names of old midwives still linger on the lips of grandmothers. And as I wait for the birth of my first child—a daughter—this meditation is no longer academic. It beats with the pulse of my own life.

For centuries, the healer was imagined as a woman—keeper of the fragile threshold between life and death. She was worshipped, feared, sometimes destroyed. Yet her image endures, scattered like fragments of a sacred anatomy.

In ancient Egypt, Isis gathered the severed body of Osiris and stitched it back together, breathing life into the fragments—the first reconstruction, the first resurrection. In Mesopotamia, Gula, the great physician, was invoked on clay tablets as “the one who makes the broken whole again.” In Ireland, Brigid guards healing wells that still flow today; ribbons tied on the trees above them flutter like living prayers. In India, Shakti is the pulse of creation itself, fierce and nurturing at once. Without her, even the male gods are powerless.

And across the ocean, among the Maya, there was Ix Chel, the moon goddess of healing and childbirth. Women once crossed the sea by canoe to reach her temple on Cozumel, bearing offerings so their labor would be safe. Imagine the sight: whole fleets of women rowing toward the horizon, their prayers glimmering under the same moon that still watches us in the theatre.

Everywhere, the pattern repeats. When myth gave way to religion, the healer did not vanish—she merely changed her garments.

In Judaism, the midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied Pharaoh’s command to kill newborn Hebrew boys. They risked their lives to protect those most fragile.

In Christianity, women saints’ wounds became instruments of grace. Saint Agatha, tortured in the third century—her breasts cut off—is venerated as the protector of women with breast disease. In art she is shown carrying her severed breasts on a silver platter: shocking, unforgettable, yet tender, interceding for those who see their pain reflected in hers.

In Islam, Rufaida al-Aslamia is remembered as the first Muslim nurse. In the seventh century, she pitched a tent near the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, organized women to treat the wounded, and trained others in the art of care.

And in Buddhism, Green Tara was born from the tears of a bodhisattva who wept for the suffering of the world. She vowed always to be reborn as a woman, to rescue those in labor and despair.

But power had limits. The midwife, for instance, could save lives, yet risk being burned for witchcraft. One story endures: that of Anna Göldi, Switzerland, 1782, a servant known for her herbal cures. When the child she cared for fell ill, the villagers accused her of witchcraft. She was tortured until she confessed, then executed—the last legal witch killing in Europe. History called her a witch. In truth, she was a healer.

In colonial Mexico, Indigenous women healers like Isabel de la Cruz Mejía were frequently denounced to for “superstitious healing”—the blending of botanical remedies with ritual and prayer—and subjected to trials that ended in public flogging, penance, or banishment.¹

And in the Caribbean, enslaved women who knew the power of plants—who could ease pain or end it—were feared and punished. The law called their practice obeah and made it a crime.

Yet not all stories end in smoke.

In twelfth-century Italy, Trota of Salerno co-authored The Trotula, a treatise on women’s health so influential that later historians doubted she had existed—because woman physicians seemed too improbable to believe. In nineteenth-century New York, Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to medical school as a joke, graduated first in her class, and founded the first college for women doctors. And Dr. James Barry, a British army surgeon who performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections in which both mother and child survived, lived and died as a man—and only then was discovered to be female.

Even triumph carried wounds. Marie Curie discovered radium and polonium, gifts that transformed medicine and devoured her body. Adrienne Rich wrote of her:

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.²

To heal is to touch the dangerous.

After centuries of silence and exclusion, women gradually entered hospitals, universities, and theatres. But the ghosts of the old myths linger under fluorescent light.

In our recent systematic review of twenty-five studies across orthopaedic surgery, women were nearly twice as likely to experience sexual harassment or gender-based discrimination.³  Every female resident reported microinsults; attrition among women remains more than double that of men.⁴ In some cohorts, sixty percent faced bias over pregnancy or childcare—often from senior surgeons.

We no longer burn women for healing. We no longer drown them. But the punishment continues—quieter now, disguised as jokes, whispers, exclusion. The witch hunt has not ended; it has only changed its form. What, then, is healing?

Healing is power. And power is never neutral.

The female healer was venerated when her power served the home, the temple, the child. She was feared when that power crossed thresholds—when she reached for the scalpel, the law, the microscope. The goddess became the witch; the midwife, the heretic.

Today, women surgeons inherit that paradox. They heal not only with touch, but with precision and steel. They wield the same instruments once used to exclude them. Yet prejudice still dwells in the gap between what women are and what society imagines them to be.

To heal has always been sacred. To heal as a woman has always been contested.

And so I return to where I began. I am not only a surgeon. I am also a father. Soon I will welcome my first child—a daughter. She will carry the blood of healers and storytellers. If one day she stands beneath the white light of an operating theatre, I hope she inherits not the silence of erasure nor the scars of exclusion, but the dignity of the women who came before her. Because this lineage is not broken. It is alive.

Perhaps healing was never only about mending the body. Perhaps it was about remembering where the art began. This is the lineage of she who heals. And her story—our story—is not yet finished.

References

1. Chase M. The Scandalous Case of Isabel de la Cruz Mejía: Healing, Ethnicity, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Mexico. MA thesis. Reno, NV: University of Nevada, Reno; 2013.
2. Rich A. Power. In: The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W.W. Norton; 1978.
3. Najjar E, et al. Hidden Fractures: Bullying, Harassment, and Inequity in Orthopaedic Surgery. Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (PROSPERO CRD420251078179). Unpublished data, 2025.
4. Rohde RS, Wolf JM, Adams JE. Where are the women in orthopaedic surgery? Clin Orthop Relat Res.2016;474:1950-1956.