The Tragic, Trailblazing Life of Dr. Anandibai Joshi

Adorned in a sari, 21-year-old Anandibai Joshi crossed the graduation stage in Philadelphia to receive her medical degree in 1886. Her journey had started years earlier, thanks to a letter her husband wrote, which the Princeton Missionary Review had published. 

In 1879, Gopalrao Joshi, a postal clerk then stationed in Kohlapur (in present-day Maharashtra), wrote a letter asking for support to help his wife study in America: “I should, therefore, if it please God, like to take to my wife to America for her being thoroughly educated. I am not in a position to undertake the journey, and to defray my expenses of settling down in America…I should like to see her follow any profession, namely, medicine or education, so that she may be of immense use to her country sisters.”

This was a radical prospect in many ways, challenging not only Victorian gender roles, but also colonial assumptions about who held medical knowledge. But one teenage girl — married at 9, widowed by history — would reimagine healthcare for Indian women — who “would rather die than accept treatment at the hands of a male physician.”