Born: 1905, France
Died: 1981
Country most active: Egypt
Also known as: Françoise Demartres
The wife of Egyptologist Bernard Bruyère, Françoise Demartres was 25 years his junior when they met through her uncle, the director of Cairo’s French Institute of Oriental Archaeology Pierre Jouguet. In 1931, she was visiting Egypt to escape the fallout from her parents’ divorce in Paris and accompanied her aunt and uncle on a trip to Deir el-Medina. She soon fell in love with both the quiet, baren landscape, full of hidden history, and Bruyère, who was in charge of excavations at the site. They married the following year in Paris and, returning to Deir el-Medina, Françoise established a dispensary and began treating injuries and illnesses of both the archaeologists and the local worker. Despite having no medical training, she soon learned how to treat a wide range of conditions, from cobra bites to dysentery.
Locals from the nearby village of Kurna (Gourna) began coming to her for help, and she quickly learned Arabic as almost none of them spoke French, becoming more fluent than her husband or his other French colleagues. Traveling to Kurna to treat villagers, she focused on caring for women and children, providing prenatal care, delivering babies and helping new mothers care for their infants. French writer Claudine Le Tourneur d’Ison observed, “Nothing frightened her. Nothing repelled her. Her only concern was to help, in one way or another those who were in pain, no matter who they were.”
Bruyère adopted local practices when she visited the village, including wearing a burnoose (a long hooded cloak) over her clothes and a scarf to cover her hair, and studying the Quran.
She lacked the funds needed to keep pace with her increasing number of patients, so she went to pharmacies and doctors in Luxor to ask for any unused medicines they might be willing to part with. News of her work and her need made it to Cairo, where an Egyptian princess (a first cousin of King Fawad) offered to fund Bruyère’s work.
According to one account, one of Bruyère’s patients was a mysterious Bedouin stranger who arrived at the dispensary with a badly infected arm wound. He didn’t say a word and, after failing to establish his identity, Bruyère too was silent as she cleaned and disinfected the wound, removed the bullet, dressed it and gave the man medicine. He returned for clean dressings over the next several days, neither of them speaking during these visits. Then, his wound healed, he vanished and they assumed they would never see him again. Weeks later, Bruyère was returning from a trip to Luxor for supplies and she and her assistant were accosted at dusk by three men, demanding money. As she cursed them in Arabic, one of the bandits sharply began issuing orders to the other two. It was her Bedouin patient, who told her, “You are sacred to us. We will never touch a hair on your head.” The three men left, and she never saw him again.
(This entry is based on information from the 2023 book Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson.)