Christmas is coming – and as usual I’ll be hoping that someone sends me a card with Mary’s two midwives. “What midwives?”, I hear you thinking. Take another look at this well-known painting – especially the two women centre front. They have bathed the baby, swaddled him and handed him back to his mother: the two legendary midwives who cared for Mary and Jesus and became his first followers.
Often forgotten today, Salome and Zebel’s extraordinary story has been known throughout Christendom for nearly 2,000 years. They aren’t mentioned in the New Testament, but feature in a strange, disturbing tale first recorded around the year 150. Joseph brings them to the stable in Bethlehem but they arrive too late – Mary has given birth alone. Zebel is an instant believer that baby Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, but Salome isn’t so sure. Claims of virgin births weren’t uncommon. So, like every good midwife, she rolls up her sleeves to do the post-partum examination. This doesn’t go well, to say the least, and she is punished, but then redeemed by baby Jesus’ first miracle.
This ancient Legend of the Doubting Midwife made Salome the most famous midwife ever. Other legendary midwives attended the births of Mary and many saints. You can easily spot them once you start looking, in altarpieces, sculptures, oil paintings and frescoes in churches and art galleries across Europe and beyond. We see them bathing holy babies, wrapping them in swaddling clothes and chucking them under the chin. They also featured down the centuries in sermons, plays and poems, and Christmas carols. Their personal dramas bring a human touch to the extraordinary events unfolding around them. They also carry heavy symbolic freight linked with fierce theological debates.
Later, ignorance and misogyny meant the midwives were frequently written out of art history. Even scholars who noticed them often failed to acknowledge them as midwives, instead describing them as, and I quote: servants, handmaidens, shepherdesses, bystanders, lowly figures, decoration, figures put there to fill the space, and unnamed women. This puzzled, annoyed and goaded me into reading widely and deeply while looking out for sightings. But I too had never noticed them before hearing about them at a lecture in Florence, despite all my campaigning to raise the public image of nurses and midwives; we see what we are conditioned to see.
After that lecture, I embarked on a voyage of discovery alongside my busy career. I tracked Salome and Zebel from the first mention of Mary’s pregnancy in the New Testament to Jesus’ birth, and beyond to his death. Friends sent me photos: ‘Is this one of them?’ And I encountered innumerable other people down the ages who loved, feared, imagined or portrayed them, including artists, makers, writers, poets, composers, singers, parish priests, archbishops, popes, monks and nuns. Bringing these often marginalised or ignored women into this story – past and present, fictional and real – is another way of hearing and heeding women’s voices.
Early in 2026, I’m launching my short hardback book, The Midwife’s Book of Hours, and an accompanying full-length e-book, The Midwives’ Gospel: The forgotten women at the birth of Jesus. They blend history, theology, creative non-fiction, the politics of health, and memoir. Imagining what Salome and Zebel might have experienced, I give voices to them and other women who prayed to them, saw and commissioned pictures of them, watched them in miracle plays and heard about them in sermons.
They changed my ways of seeing and understanding, and the resonances with my personal journey slowly became clearer. I view their journeys through the lens of my long career in global nursing and midwifery, and my perspective as an atheist trying to understand the enduring appeal of Christianity.
My research restores this missing piece of art history: as Virginia Woolf said, “Women’s history has to be read into the scene of its own exclusion – invented – both discovered and made up.” At a time when midwifery globally is in crisis, and one million more midwives are needed, can we afford to forget the most famous midwives of all?
Often forgotten today, Salome and Zebel’s extraordinary story has been known throughout Christendom for nearly 2,000 years. They aren’t mentioned in the New Testament, but feature in a strange, disturbing tale first recorded around the year 150. Joseph brings them to the stable in Bethlehem but they arrive too late – Mary has given birth alone. Zebel is an instant believer that baby Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, but Salome isn’t so sure. Claims of virgin births weren’t uncommon. So, like every good midwife, she rolls up her sleeves to do the post-partum examination. This doesn’t go well, to say the least, and she is punished, but then redeemed by baby Jesus’ first miracle.
This ancient Legend of the Doubting Midwife made Salome the most famous midwife ever. Other legendary midwives attended the births of Mary and many saints. You can easily spot them once you start looking, in altarpieces, sculptures, oil paintings and frescoes in churches and art galleries across Europe and beyond. We see them bathing holy babies, wrapping them in swaddling clothes and chucking them under the chin. They also featured down the centuries in sermons, plays and poems, and Christmas carols. Their personal dramas bring a human touch to the extraordinary events unfolding around them. They also carry heavy symbolic freight linked with fierce theological debates.
Later, ignorance and misogyny meant the midwives were frequently written out of art history. Even scholars who noticed them often failed to acknowledge them as midwives, instead describing them as, and I quote: servants, handmaidens, shepherdesses, bystanders, lowly figures, decoration, figures put there to fill the space, and unnamed women. This puzzled, annoyed and goaded me into reading widely and deeply while looking out for sightings. But I too had never noticed them before hearing about them at a lecture in Florence, despite all my campaigning to raise the public image of nurses and midwives; we see what we are conditioned to see.
After that lecture, I embarked on a voyage of discovery alongside my busy career. I tracked Salome and Zebel from the first mention of Mary’s pregnancy in the New Testament to Jesus’ birth, and beyond to his death. Friends sent me photos: ‘Is this one of them?’ And I encountered innumerable other people down the ages who loved, feared, imagined or portrayed them, including artists, makers, writers, poets, composers, singers, parish priests, archbishops, popes, monks and nuns. Bringing these often marginalised or ignored women into this story – past and present, fictional and real – is another way of hearing and heeding women’s voices.
Early in 2026, I’m launching my short hardback book, The Midwife’s Book of Hours, and an accompanying full-length e-book, The Midwives’ Gospel: The forgotten women at the birth of Jesus. They blend history, theology, creative non-fiction, the politics of health, and memoir. Imagining what Salome and Zebel might have experienced, I give voices to them and other women who prayed to them, saw and commissioned pictures of them, watched them in miracle plays and heard about them in sermons.
They changed my ways of seeing and understanding, and the resonances with my personal journey slowly became clearer. I view their journeys through the lens of my long career in global nursing and midwifery, and my perspective as an atheist trying to understand the enduring appeal of Christianity.
My research restores this missing piece of art history: as Virginia Woolf said, “Women’s history has to be read into the scene of its own exclusion – invented – both discovered and made up.” At a time when midwifery globally is in crisis, and one million more midwives are needed, can we afford to forget the most famous midwives of all?
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