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. 1634, often called the "Father of German surgery"). By training, Colinet was a midwife-surgeon who perfected the techniques in Germany of cesarean section delivery (which hadn't changed since the days of Julius Caesar) and who was the first (in 1624) to use a magnet to extract metal from a patient's eye (a technique still in use today). Her husband wrote a detailed description of the procedure, explicitly mentioning his wife as having invented it. However it was he who was given credit for her discovery. She was the mother of eight children, only one of whom (Johannes) outlived her.

Marie Colinet