Anandibai Joshi

Anandi was married at nine and had a baby by fourteen — a baby who died because there was no good doctor nearby. Heartbroken, she promised herself she would learn medicine so no other mother in India would have to suffer that.

With help from her husband and a family in far-away America, she sailed across the ocean, all alone, wearing her sari. In 1886 she became the first Indian woman to earn a Western medical degree.

Anandibai Gopalrao Joshi (1865–1887) was born Yamuna in Kalyan, Maharashtra. Married at nine to Gopalrao Joshi, a postal clerk who insisted she be educated, she lost her first child at fourteen due to poor medical care.

That grief pushed her to study medicine at a time when Indian women rarely left their homes for higher education.

Encouraged by an American well-wisher, Theodicia Carpenter, she sailed to the United States in 1883 and enrolled at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Facing loneliness, cold winters and tuberculosis, she still graduated MD in 1886 with a thesis on obstetrics among Hindu women.

Queen Victoria sent a personal message of congratulations. She returned to India as physician-in-charge of the female ward at Albert Edward Hospital in the princely state of Kolhapur, but tuberculosis took her life in 1887, just before her 22nd birthday.

Her short life opened a door that thousands of Indian women doctors have walked through since.