Nearly 200 Women General Surgeons Now Work in Cuba
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- 12 / 06 / 2008
That figure was announced at the Havana Convention Center during the 10th Cuban Surgical Congress, which is being held in tandem with regional meeting of the Latin American federation of that specialty.
At those events, admiration was evidenced for the contribution made by woman doctors to this branch of public health.
Of the 125 of participants in the meeting, 74 presented papers on various topics of scientific work.
“Surgery was always been associated with profuse bleeding, serious accidents, urgent care and medical emergencies, which have generally been the exclusive domain of men—as has been medicine in general,” explained doctor and professor José Miguel Goderich Lalán, who is the president of the congress and of the Cuban Surgery Society. He spoke at the Thursday morning session of the gathering.
Goderich Lalán pointed out that before the 1959 revolutionary victory in Cuba, the number of women working in general surgery could be counted on one’s fingers. The fact that there are now nearly 200 women surgeons among the 1,300 such professions in the country is a tremendous achievement of the 50 years of the Cuban Revolution, he highlighted.
“Most of the surgical professionals who are second level specialist today are female. Moreover, they have demonstrated that they daring, brave, intelligent, creative, responsible and prompt in their daily service in operating rooms,” he commented.
“We cannot say, for example, who are the three or five most outstanding women surgeons in Cuba; but we can say that they are included among the best surgeons in the country today,” he added.
Young surgeon Cristina de la Caridad Martín Blanco, from the Antonio Luaces Iraola Provincial Teaching Hospital in Ciego de Ávila, said that over the course each year in which Cuba has remained blockaded and besieged, women have been taught to advance in the immense majority of professions and trades.
This does not mean that surgery on the island has lagged behind. Cited as one example of this, among hundreds, is the fact that Dr. Eduardo Molina Fernández, the general surgeon who directs the Hernias and Abdominal Wall section of the Cuban Surgical Society, is the sole Latin American to have won the prestigious Frudchaud Prize, which was awarded in 2001 by the American Hernia Society.
(Juventud Rebelde)
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