Did you know there are records of midwives attending Mary for the birth of the baby Jesus? Portrayed in art over the centuries, Professor Jane Salvage, Independent Nursing Consultant and Visiting Professor, Kingston University, London shares her fascination for these midwives and the publication of her studies in two books.
Last Christmas, did anyone send you a card with Mary’s two midwives?
‘What midwives?’, I hear you thinking.
Take another look at the well-known painting at the top of this page – especially the two women centre front. They have bathed the baby (who appears twice), swaddled him and handed him back to his mother.
They are Salome and Zebel, the legendary midwives who cared for Mary and Jesus and became his first followers. Often forgotten today, their extraordinary story has been known around the world for nearly 2000 years. You won’t find them in the Bible, but the midwives feature in a strange, disturbing tale first recorded around the year 150.
Joseph brought them to the stable in Bethlehem, we are told, but they arrived 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 of Mary.
This doesn’t go well, to say the least. She is punished but then redeemed by baby Jesus’ first miracle. This ancient Legend of the Doubting Midwife made her 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.
When I started to research them, as a fascinating hobby alongside my busy day job, I found that the midwives were frequently written out of art history. Through ignorance and misogyny, even scholars who did notice them often failed to acknowledge them as midwives. Instead, they are described as servants, handmaidens, shepherdesses, bystanders, lowly figures, decoration, figures put there to fill the space, and unnamed women.
How does that make you feel?
It puzzled, annoyed and goaded me into reading widely and deeply while looking out for sightings. But, true confessions time, I too had never noticed them before I heard about them at a lecture in Florence, despite all my campaigning to improve the public image of nurses and midwives. We all see what we are conditioned to see.
After that lecture I embarked on a voyage of discovery, tracking portrayals of Salome and Zebel in art and story. I spotted them from the first mention of Mary’s pregnancy to Jesus’ birth, and beyond. Friends sent me photos: ‘Is this one of them?’ And I encountered innumerable other people down the ages who loved, feared, imagined and portrayed them, including artists, makers, writers, poets, composers, singers, archbishops, popes, parish priests, monks and nuns.
Bringing these often marginalised or ignored women into the Christmas story – past and present, fictional and real – is another way of hearing and heeding women’s voices. My hobby eventually birthed two books: a short hardback picture-book, The Midwife’s Book of Hours, and a full-length e-book, The Midwives’ Gospel: The forgotten women at the birth of Jesus.
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. The nativity midwives changed my ways of seeing and understanding.
I pose highly topical questions about representations of women and who gets to tell or suppress their stories. Resonating with the challenges women worldwide face today as mothers, midwives and leaders, the books are rooted in my practice, scholarship and advocacy in the UK and worldwide as a nursing and midwifery leader. The resonances with my personal journey slowly became clearer as I viewed their journeys through the lens of my long career.
This compelling and accessible story combines memoir, history, feminism and midwifery from a unique and surprising angle. So join me on an adventure through the art galleries, palaces and churches of Europe and beyond, as we restore this missing piece of art history.
‘Women’s history has to be read into the scene of its own exclusion – invented – both discovered and made up,’ said Virginia Woolf. At a time when one million more midwives are needed and midwifery globally is in crisis, can we afford to ignore Salome and Zebel, the most famous midwives of all?
The Midwife’s Book of Hours, published by Haywood Books, is available in good bookshops and at https://haywoodbooks.com/the-midwifes-book-of-hours. With proof of purchase, The Midwives’ Gospel can be downloaded free at janesalvage.com.
About Jane Salvage
Jane Salvage left clinical nursing in the East End of London to work as a journalist, and wrote The Politics of Nursing (Heinemann 1985). At WHO she was director of nursing and midwifery in the European region (1991-1995), and subsequently worked on different projects in many countries. She was a policy lead in the Department of Health, England, and co-author of Front Line Care (2010), Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Commission report on the future of nursing and midwifery. She was co-author of the Willis Commission on Nursing Education report Quality with compassion (2012). Her work as policy adviser to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, and co-authorship of Triple Impact (2016), contributed to the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. She is a visiting professor at Kingston University, UK.
February 2026