Marie Colinet

Marie Colinet (Fabry) (ca. 1560 - ca. 1640), the daughter of a Swiss printer, was born in Geneva, Switzerland.

On July 25, 1587, at St. Gervais church in Geneva, she married a surgeon, Wilhelm Fabry (also William Fabry, Guilelmus Fabricius Hildanus, or Fabricius von Hilden, b. June 25, 1560, d. February 15, 1634, often called the "Father of German surgery").

By training, Colinet was a midwife-surgeon who perfected the techniques in Germany of Caesarean section delivery (which hadn't changed since the days of Julius Caesar). In addition, she assisted her husband in his surgical practice and took care of his patients while he was traveling. In 1624, after her husband had attempted unsuccessfully to extract metal from a patient's eye, she came up with the idea to use a magnet—a technique which worked then and still is in use today. Her husband wrote a detailed description of the procedure (in his Centuriae), explicitly mentioning his wife as having invented it. However, it was he who was given credit for her discovery.^[1]

She was the mother of eight children, only one of whom (Johannes, later a surgeon himself) outlived her. Documents of her whereabouts after the death of her husband have not yet been found.

References

1. ^ Stanley, Autumn, "Women Hold Up Two-Thirds of the Sky: Notes for a Revised History of Technology". In Hopkins, Patrick D., ed. (1998). Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, p. 24. Indiana University Press.

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