Dr. Catherine Hamlin, an Australian obstetrician and gynecologist who devoted her life to treating Ethiopian women with a devastating childbearing injury and helped develop pioneering techniques to treat it, died on Wednesday at her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. She was 96.

Her death was announced by the Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation in Sydney, Australia, an independent charity she co-founded.

Dr. Hamlin, responding to an advertisement, arrived in Ethiopia with her husband, Reginald Hamlin, also a physician, in 1959 to work as a gynecologist at a hospital in Addis Ababa. But what started as a planned three-year stint turned into a six-decade-long mission in which the two doctors worked closely with women who had a childbearing injury known as obstetric fistula.

The condition is caused when prolonged labor opens a hole in the birth canal, leaving many women incontinent. For Ethiopian women, the injury often led to their being rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities.