Woman Heal Thyself, the engaging title of Jeanne Elizabeth Blum's book, came to my attention when the seeds of this present project were but germinating. Her provocative play on the Lukan text ‘Physician, heal thyself’ (Lk. 4.23) brought into focus two seemingly conflicting worlds. It was not at all surprising, in the dying years of the twentieth century, that ‘woman’ would be invited to heal. Indeed, over the course of that century, increasing numbers of women have engaged in all aspects of healing. The decentring effect of Blum's text lay elsewhere. It was the insertion of ‘woman’ into the Lukan gospel command to heal. Suddenly I realized that despite the widespread language of healing in the Second Testament and the significance of the commissions to heal given by Jesus, that no women are specifically named as healers in these early Christian texts or are among those explicitly commissioned by Jesus to heal.

This is a significant lacuna at the very time when women are becoming more aware of the ways in which texts from the past, and reconstructions of that past, shape both the present and the future; and when more and more women are becoming engaged across the spectrum of healing, seeking their genealogies but also critically examining the very construction of healing. The reading of our past, therefore, is not a thing of the past.