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29 May
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Three
amazing women.
The
three women pictured in this incredible photograph from 1885 -- Anandibai Joshi
of India, Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria -- each became
the first licensed female doctors in their respective countries. The three were
students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; one of the only places
in the world at the time where women could study medicine.
As
Mallika Rao writes in HuffPost, "If the timing doesn't seem quite right,
that's understandable. In 1885, women in the U.S. still couldn't vote, nor were
they encouraged to learn very much. Popular wisdom decreed that studying was a
threat to motherhood." Given this, how did three women from around the
world end up studying there to become doctors? The credit, according to
Christopher Woolf of PRI's The World, goes to the Quakers who "believed in
women’s rights enough to set up the WMCP way back in 1850 in Germantown.”
Woolf
added, "It was the first women’s medical college in the world, and
immediately began attracting foreign students unable to study medicine in their
home countries. First they came from elsewhere in North America and Europe, and
then from further afield. Women, like Joshi in India and Keiko Okami in Japan,
heard about WMCP, and defied expectations of society and family to travel
independently to America to apply, then figure out how to pay for their tuition
and board... . Besides the international students, it also produced the
nation’s first Native American woman doctor, Susan LeFlesche, while African
Americans were often students as well. Some of whom, like Eliza Grier, were
former slaves."
