The Women of Medicine: A Timely Archive of India’s Pathbreaking ‘Lady Doctors’
Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors visits the forgotten history of six women who persisted to become pioneering practitioners in the field. With continuing roadblocks for women in medicine, their story remains prescient in our contemporary times.
Until barely two centuries ago, western medicine proposed a bizarre list of illnesses and remedies targeted at women, including recommending seclusion as a remedy for the ‘illness’ of menstruation, declaring pregnancy a disabling condition, barring women from higher education for the threat it would apparently pose to the uterus, and conducting clitoridectomies to tame women’s behaviour. It was clear that the professional viewed woman’s bodies from a skewed, male lens.
Troubling as these diagnoses are, they pale in comparison to American gynaecology’s brutal use of enslaved black women’s bodies “to experiment on, to examine, and to, in their words, “cure” or “fix” diseases and disorders”. This violent history begins to make sense if we look at the origins of Euro-American medicine, marked by the suppression of women health workers—dismissed, hunted, and burnt as witches—and the simultaneous rise of an exclusively white male medical profession under the patronage and protection of the ruling class.
It is little surprise then that, by extension, the western medical profession in India has historically been averse to the presence of women in any capacity—other than as patients.
Each chapter reiterates how the women profiled within these pages had to simultaneously contend with a casteist patriarchy that sought to prevent their entry into the public sphere, orientalist attitudes that read them as the foreign ‘other’, and colonial prejudices that favoured European women doctors over them.
A small number of early women medical practitioners are at the centre of author and journalist Kavitha Rao’s latest book, Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine (Westland, 2021). As the title suggests, Rao uncovers the erased and forgotten histories of six women who were among the first in colonial India to enter a profession virulently opposed to their presence. These women, Rao demonstrates, forced medical schools to open their tightly-barred doors to future generations of women, persisted in their education despite institutional and individual hostility, and went on to become pioneering practitioners in the field. Some of them established medical schools for women, hospitals, and cancer institutes.
Despite all this, there is little public memory of their singular achievements. Rao’s account of India’s earliest ‘lady doctors’ seeks to undo this collective amnesia.
Lady Doctors chronicles the lives of Anandibai Joshi, the first Indian woman to study medicine abroad; Kadambini Ganguly, who persuaded the Calcutta Medical College to open its doors to women; Rukhmabai Raut, who fended off vicious attacks from conservative nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak when she sought to divorce the man she was married to as a child, before going on to study medicine in the United Kingdom and work as a doctor in Mumbai and Surat; Haimabati Sen, who enrolled to train as a hospital assistant amid great economic hardship and was forced to give up her gold medal despite topping her class after protests from her male colleagues; Muthulakshmi Reddy who found the Cancer Institute in Adyar; and Mary Poonen Lukose, the first woman surgeon general of India—and perhaps in the world.
It is an extensive archival work, put together by assimilating scattered information in the form of letters, journal entries, public records, newspaper reports and op-eds, and where available, memoirs and autobiographies. While at first glance, the ‘lady doctors’ profiled in this book appear to have been picked arbitrarily, the choice was likely determined by the extent of archives available. At several points in the book, Rao circles back to the paucity of information about them. When memoirs were written, as in the case of Haimabati Sen, they remained ignored in old trunks “because no one thought it worthy of notice”. When letters and diaries did exist, few chronicled their struggles with navigating sexism, misogyny, and casteism and the cost of defying social convention. An exception is Sen’s memoir which eloquently and unreservedly criticises her husband, the deprivation she faced as a child widow in colonial Bengal, and the patriarchal order that hounded her for wanting an education.
As a precursor to their stories, the first chapter recalls the first women medical students, physicians, and surgeons in the United States and Europe who, no doubt, served as inspiration for the six women chronicled in this book. Readers are reacquainted with the lives and achievements of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garett Anderson, and Sophie Jex-Blake, among others. A somewhat ambiguous inclusion in this list is James Barry, whom some accounts describe as an “ambitious woman ahead of her time” masquerading as a man to study and practice medicine and surgery, but others, like historian David Obermeyer, emphasise as a trans man. To be fair, Rao acknowledges the latter possibility but rather inexplicably gives the final word to Jeremy Dronfield’s transphobic biography of Barry. As Sara Westrop points out, Dronfield is not just dismissive of Barry as a trans man but also deadnames him repeatedly. In a book titled Lady Doctors, which uses gender as a critical analytical category, Barry’s inclusion sits somewhat awkwardly.
The next six chapters, titled “The Good Wife”, “The Rule Breaker”, “The Fighter”, etc. are dedicated to the six Indian trailblazing figures who, in the early nineteenth century, fought for women’s right to enroll into medical schools, practice in the field, and generally, occupy the public sphere in ways that would invite the ire of a casteist-patriarchal society. For some, like Joshi and Ganguly, upper-caste privilege, supportive fathers or husbands, or economic prosperity would render their ambitious journeys somewhat feasible, though never easy. Others, like Raut and Sen may have had the support of their fathers for a while but were forced to go it alone for the better part, disadvantaged not only by their gender but also by caste or poverty. It is to the book’s credit that it eschews a singular focus on gender to pay attention to how its overlaps with caste and class exacerbated the particular struggles faced by each of these women.
The chapter on Joshi, for instance, not only details her singular feat as the first woman in India to study medicine, but also recounts her studied adherence to vegetarianism, deliberate emphasis on wifely devotion, and support for child marriage despite being a child bride to an abusive husband. This conservatism, coupled with her upper-caste status, earned Joshi the praise of the orthodox Brahmin community and the (upper caste) Indian press, and perhaps also eased the perilous path she had chosen to tread. To an extent, she lent herself to appropriation by Hindu nationalists like Tilak, who would later use Joshi’s Brahminical conservatism to viciously condemn another pioneer in the field.
Raut, in many ways, was the ‘rebel’ to Joshi’s ‘good wife’. Raut’s battle was not only of an ambitious woman wanting to study to be a doctor, but to do so as a woman from a historically oppressed caste. But it is her years-long struggle to divorce a man she was married to at 11 that marked Raut out for vitriolic backlash, most notably from Tilak who launched a personal attack against her in the Marathi journal Kesari. Joshi’s upholding of ideal Hindu womanhood and Raut’s defiance of this image produced starkly opposite responses to their struggles, even as they both harboured the same goals.
Rao’s book is invested in restoring these struggles, tensions, and contradictions to public memory. More importantly, it never loses sight of how their stories are intertwined with the history of British colonialism, the nineteenth-century social reform movement and the conservative backlash against it, the suffragette movement in the U.S. and the Vote for Women movement in colonial India. Each chapter goes beyond an ode to individual exceptionalism to contextualise the motivations and complexities of Rao’s subjects. Each chapter reiterates how the women profiled within these pages had to simultaneously contend with a casteist patriarchy that sought to prevent their entry into the public sphere, orientalist attitudes that read them as the foreign ‘other’, and colonial prejudices that favoured European women doctors over them. The attention to historical context thus expands the scope of the book from an archive of the earliest women in medicine to an exploration of their encounters with colonialism, the nationalist movement, and social reforms.
Women may outnumber men in medical schools, but they are less likely to practice, since the long working hours put the onus on them to juggle a career with domestic responsibilities. This has consequences for women’s access to healthcare, which remains mired in routine sexism.
One omission of the book is a critical interrogation of whether the politics and principles of some of these women made them complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, in the exclusion of others. For instance, Rao details the aspects of Joshi’s life that would allow the reader to read into her cultural conservatism, but does not really question them. Whether Joshi’s upholding of Brahminical ideals amounts to complicity or is simply the lack of agentic control is debatable, but it is an idea worth drawing the readers’ attention to.
In the chapter on Reddy, Rao elaborates her role in abolishing the devadasi system but does not interrogate her politics. Anandhi S has argued that Reddy’s efforts were “premised on the perception that devadasis were the ‘other’—the unacceptable ‘other’—of the ideal Hindu womanhood.” Born to a devadasi mother and a Brahmin father, Reddy wrote in a letter to C. Rajagopalachari, “I consider that the saving of even one girl's honour and purity is more than equivalent to the feeding of millions of our people.” Seen in this light, it is a patriarchal version of Hindu womanhood that Reddy sought to assert by abolishing the system. Rao highlights the criticism of Reddy’s bill by Nagarathnamma—a devadasi who protested the equation of devadasis with sex workers—but does not offer an explanation of how Reddy’s particular stance on devadasi abolition inadvertently criminalised devadasi sexuality and valourised monogamous conjugality. In Rao’s analysis, Reddy’s legacy comes across as uncomplicatedly positive. To allude to these tensions is not to undermine the legacy of these extraordinary women, but rather to present them in all their complexities, and to ensure that certain narratives and figures are not propped up by bypassing others.
That said, Rao’s book does the crucial work of committing to memory women who have been ignored by history. The archival underpinnings of the book does not make it any less relevant for the contemporary moment. A 2011 study in the medical journal Lancet found that, more than a century after the first women entered medical schools in India, only a third of health workers in India are women. Women may outnumber men in medical schools, but they are less likely to practice, since the long working hours put the onus on them to juggle a career with domestic responsibilities. This has consequences for women’s access to healthcare, which remains mired in routine sexism. The medical profession may have moved beyond treating menstruation as an ‘illness’ but women still struggle to get the right medical diagnosis for ailments and find their complaints of physical pain dismissed as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychosomatic’. Women being “misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men” is commonplace enough to elicit its own descriptor—Yentl syndrome—writes Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women. And as the disproportionately adverse effects of Covid-19 vaccines on women showed, women are still routinely ignored during clinical trials.
To be sure, the gender gap in medicine receives considerable attention even if the underlying structural issues remain unaddressed. Far less acknowledged, and indeed denied, are the caste-based barriers to accessing medical education which remain firmly in place in the form of entrenched upper-caste hostility and disingenuous arguments of ‘merit’. Against this backdrop, Rao’s book is both timely and relevant. By shining a light on the gender and caste-based exclusions in the early days of the field, it allows us to trace the continuities of these historical struggles in the present moment. It is a reminder that such exclusions are not discrete outcomes but rather the result of structural barriers that extend across time and space.
The women Rao profiles are able to transcend these barriers almost entirely on the basis of their individual drive and the goodwill of a few others. In this, the book contains a caveat. It cautions that unless the profession attends to these structural issues, it will always leave it up to individuals to do the heavy-lifting.
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Sohel Sarkar is an independent writer, editor, and feminist researcher currently based in Bengaluru. Her work has appeared in Himal Southasian, Bitch Media, Whetstone Magazine, and Color Bloq, among others. You can find her on Twitter: @SohelS28 and Instagram: @sarkar.sohel10.
