By Jim Jones, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Aug. 2–Dr. Rebekah Naylor arrived in India as a young missionary surgeon in the 1970s. And though she now calls Fort Worth home, her heart remains in Bangalore, where she helped establish the city’s Baptist hospital.
After an exemplary record in medical schools — including being the first woman to complete the surgical residency program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas — Naylor could have had her pick of lucrative posts. But she chose to spend her life caring for the sick and downtrodden in the Indian city of 8 million.
What drove her to do it?
“I had a clear calling from God when I was 15” to be a missionary, she said. Her interest in mission work was stimulated by attending Girls Auxiliary (now Girls in Action) programs at Baptist churches led by her father, the late Robert Naylor, a former president of Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
And she was touched by the world’s poor as an 11-year-old traveling to Europe and the Middle East with her father and mother, Goldia Naylor.
“That was my first exposure to poverty,” she recalled. “I remember in Cairo seeing a girl maybe my age begging. It was something I had trouble understanding.”
When she arrived as a surgeon at the newly opened Bangalore Baptist Hospital in 1974, she became known as the “cutting doctor,” since there was no word for surgeon in the local language. But she quickly discovered that she “had to do everything.”
Faith heroine
It was the beginning of 35 years as a surgeon, hospital administrator and spreader of the Christian Gospel.
She delivered hundreds of babies, even though that wasn’t a surgeon’s job.
“I never lost the wonder of delivering new life,” she said. “It’s such a miracle. And it is always exciting.”
She treated many patients bitten by deadly cobras and pit vipers.
“Cobras paralyze you,” she said. “When bitten by a pit viper, your blood doesn’t clot.”
Naylor recalled one cobra bite victim who had brought the snake with him.
“He didn’t kill it for religious reasons. It was in a burlap bag,” she said. “I had gotten the man stable in the intensive care unit and heard all this commotion in the waiting room. People were out of their heads because here was this live cobra in a bag.”
On trips in India and the United States, Naylor helped raise money to expand the hospital. When she arrived there were 80 beds; now there are 199. She expanded the chaplaincy program. She spearheaded getting accreditation as a teaching hospital. One of her first interns in 1979, Dr. Alexander Thomas, is now director of the hospital.
Along the way she founded the Rebekah Ann Naylor School of Nursing, which sends student nurses into villages to care for the poor. Under her leadership, the hospital began a feeding program for children suffering from malnutrition.
She helped establish training programs for X-ray technicians and other specialties.
“She’s one of our modern-day heroes of the faith,”‘ said Kenneth Hemphill, a longtime family friend and former president of the seminary who is now national strategist for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Empowering Kingdom Growth initiative.
Naylor has a remarkable legacy, said the Rev. Michael Dean, pastor of Fort Worth’s Travis Avenue Baptist Church, of which Naylor is a member.
“Apart from her work in the hospital, she has done all sorts of humanitarian things and helped start many churches,” Dean said. “When people come to the hospital, they often hear about Jesus Christ. When they return to their villages, chaplains follow up and it has resulted in many new churches.”
But Naylor’s tenure was not without conflict.
She was burned in effigy during a 1990s labor dispute. She faced criminal charges early in the 1990s, later dropped, after the hospital, which produced nutritional supplements, was accused of violating India’s factory laws. The hospital’s existence was threatened when India began nationalizing its hospital system and the Baptist mission board announced that it would phase out regular funding.
Inspired leader
Naylor helped save the hospital when many thought it would be closed by partnering with Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, Thomas said. The hospital still bears the Baptist name and Southern Baptists help support it with the annual Lottie Moon Offering and other sources.
“Her legendary hard work and her values have inspired many of us,” Thomas said.
Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board in Richmond, Va., wrote of Naylor’s staying power in the preface of a new biography, Rebekah Ann Naylor, M.D.: Missionary Surgeon in Changing Times, (Hannibal Books, $19.95) written by Camille Lee Hornbeck of Fort Worth.
“Missionary colleagues came and went,” Rankin wrote, “but Rebekah stayed. She persevered through visa denials and removal of her medical credentials. Friends of influence intervened …but inevitably the inexplicable and miraculous hand of God would restore her work permit.”
Naylor, 64, returned to Fort Worth in 2002 to care for her 99-year-old mother. Since that time, Naylor has been clinical assistant professor in surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, where she has won teaching awards, including the 2007 Distinguished Clinical Science Educator Award.
She remains a Baptist missionary and frequently travels to India to partner with Indian Christians in starting churches. She’s also a consultant for Baptist Hospital in Bangalore.
“In India, it’s phenomenal what’s taking place,” she said. “It’s much like China where people now are more open to Christianity.”
Although Naylor officially retires as a Baptist missionary in January, it will not end her work. Her heart remains in India.
“It’s my life,” she said. “I go to India every six months. I’ll continue to live partly in Fort Worth, partly in India. The only difference when I retire will be who pays my airline ticket.”
Rebekah Naylor Valedictorian, Paschal High School in Fort Worth, 1960
Graduated magna cum laude from Baylor University in Waco; named Outstanding Premedical Student
Graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville; winner of Weinstein Prize in Medicine, 1968
First female resident to complete surgery program at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, 1973
Christian Medical and Dental Association Missionary of the Year, 2003
Distinguished Alumni Award, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1994
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