When Anandibai Joshee applied to medical school, she wrote that she wanted to attend so that she could offer other Indian women “true medical aid they so sadly stand in need of and which they would rather die than accept at the hands of a male physician.”
Born in Kalyan, India, in 1865, Joshee’s pursuit of medical education brought her to Philly in 1883, where she began her studies at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania — the first women’s medical school in the world that could grant M.D. degrees. (Eventually, the school would become part of the Drexel University School of Medicine.)
Five years before arriving in Philly, Joshee had a baby at age 13, but her child passed away at just 10 days old. She attributed the death to a lack of health care, and that experience helped motivate her to pursue medicine.
At the time, however, getting a medical education was unusual for an Indian woman of Joshee’s social class, so her husband helped her find lodgings in Philly so she could go there to study.
People in their community questioned why she’d travel so far to pursue her goals — but despite those eyebrow raises, Joshee made the trip across the world without her husband, who stayed behind in India. At the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, she showed a lot of promise and eventually became the first Hindu woman to earn a Western medical degree. She even received congratulations from Queen Victoria.
After graduating, Joshee planned to make good on her goal of helping other women. She lined up a job as the head doctor of the women’s ward of a hospital in Kolhapur, India.
Sadly, however, Joshee contracted tuberculosis before she could start practicing medicine and died at the young age of 22, shortly after her voyage back to India.
Even though her life was cut short too soon, her legacy lives on: feminist writer Caroline Wells Healey Dall wrote a 187-page book about Joshee the year after she died, a Philly organization dedicated a day (March 31, her birthday) toward celebrating Joshee, and a crater on Venus bears her name.
