MESERET ABEBE WORKU

Tikur Anbessa obstetrician who healed thousands of women and trained a generation

Dr. Meseret Abebe Worku kept a green notebook in her coat pocket, and in it, in careful Amharic, was the name of every woman she had ever operated on, with the date and a single word: 'healed', or 'again'. The women marked 'again' she followed for years, travelling out to villages in a borrowed Land Rover, until the word could be changed. It never took her more than three visits.

She was born in 1953 in Bahir Dar, the eldest of five children of a schoolteacher, and read medicine at Haile Selassie I University, now Addis Ababa University, one of only six women in her class. She trained as an obstetrician and gynaecologist and joined Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital in 1987, where she stayed for thirty-one years. She became an expert in surgery for women who had suffered childbirth injuries, volunteered for years at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, and trained more than two hundred young doctors and midwives, many now running their own clinics across Ethiopia.

She spoke quietly, listened longer and had a famous habit of drawing the surgery in felt-tip pen on a napkin for patients too frightened to ask questions. She married Berhanu Teshome in 1980, raised two children, grew roses she was too busy to prune, and made a lentil stew that her residents begged for after night shifts. On Sunday afternoons she sat in her garden in Bole with the coffee tray and the green notebook, adding names.

Dr. Meseret died in Addis Ababa in August 2020 after a short illness, aged sixty-six. She leaves her husband, two children, two grandchildren and thousands of women who write the word 'healed' beside her name.

“Heal the woman, and you have healed the whole house.”