Doroti Rodrigues

Doroti Rodrigues (Montes Claros, October 6, 1946 – June 30, 2026), known by the Jewish name Rivka Chaya bat Gideon HaKohen (רבקה חיה בת גדעון הכהן), was a Brazilian nurse dedicated to the care of newborns. She was the daughter of Egídio Rodrigues Batista (Gideon HaKohen) and Maria das Mercês Luiz de Queiroz (Miriam), and the granddaughter of José Luiz de Queiroz (Yosef HaLevi).

Trained in nursing, she devoted herself from early in her career to maternity nurseries and to the care of premature infants, at a time when neonatology was taking its first steps in Brazil. She is remembered as one of the country's first nurses specialized in newborn care, working with premature babies whose chances of survival were smallest — many of them from Jewish families — and she took part in the movement to formalize the nursing profession that accompanied the creation of the federal and regional nursing councils (COFEN/COREN) in 1973 and the professional registration of nurses.

Brazilian nursing constituted itself as a profession over the course of the twentieth century. The memory of Ana Néri, a volunteer in the Paraguayan War, was followed by the first professional nursing school in 1890 and by the Anna Nery School of Nursing in 1923, which introduced the modern standard of training to the country. Professional practice was regulated by law in 1955, and in 1973 Law no. 5,905 created the Federal and Regional Nursing Councils (COFEN/COREN), responsible for the registration and oversight of the profession — the institutional landmark of Doroti's generation, which turned nursing from an occupation into a regulated career.

The care of the newborn followed a parallel trajectory. Until the middle of the century, the fate of premature infants depended almost entirely on their weight at birth; it was with the spread of incubators, of specialized nurseries and, from the 1970s onward, of neonatal intensive care units that the survival of low-birth-weight babies became possible. In those units the nurse is the continuous presence at the child's side, on whom vigilance, warmth, feeding and the immediate response to emergency depend. In Jewish tradition, to save one life is to save an entire world; the work of Doroti Rodrigues — the third generation of a family devoted to shelter, after a grandfather who took in refugees and a mother who taught their children — gave that principle the concrete form of decades of shifts beside the incubators.