The Accidental Rise of Women Doctors in India & Britain

Imagine walking into a hospital for a life threating disease and as you open the doors all you see is a building filled with people of the opposite sex, race, religion, and you notice people are talking, but you can’t understand them. Imagine screaming at the top of your lungs for help and having no one understand you. Now imagine your husband is yelling at you to get back in the car because he doesn’t want you to be seen by other males. Finally, imagine believing in seclusion of your body and being surrounded by people who are manipulating your clothes, exposing you and speaking gibberish as you try to conceal your body.

This was what it was like for Indian women in the 19th century. Men were able to seek medical attention, while women had to deal with their problems on their own. Seeking medical attention would disrespect their culture and shame their husbands. Why don’t they just seek women doctors you ask? Well when Britain first arrived in India they noticed health care for women was basically nonexistent (Bhadra, 18). Sadly, during this time woman in India and in Britain were not allowed to earn professional degrees in medicine in order to become doctors. Luckily, the British Empire made the implementation of Western medicine part of their colonizing mission in India. The only probable answer to provide Indian women with healthcare was to have women doctors. Through the evaluation of Dr. Frances Hoggan, one of the first British women accredited as a doctor, we see that the lack of healthcare for the women of India needed to be corrected, as women were suffering from curable diseases, had nowhere to go to give birth and were dying at a much younger age than men. The implementation of western medicine in India and the practice of female seclusion led to pioneering steps towards equality of women in the medical field not only in India, but also in Britain.

In the 1870’s Indian women were not thought of as intelligent or equal to men. In fact, the society in the nineteenth century didn’t recognize women as being capable of performing professional jobs or even being independent thinkers (Bhadra, 20). The government in India was not too concerned about the need for healthcare for women. The Indian Medical Gazette, which was a monthly journal written by Indian physicians and the main voice for medical problems in India, stated, “first, that there was no proven demand for women doctors in India and, second, that while women were “physically, mentally, and morally fitted for the profession of nursing,” they were quite unsuited to the demands and skills required of doctors” (Arnold, 260). Not only were women denied healthcare, but the male physicians did not believe they were equipped with the ability to provide medical care. This shows how gender was used to degrade women’s abilities and limit their professional potential in India during the 19th century.

The women of India actively voiced their concerns about their health and their healthcare. In an excerpt from Dr. Hoggan’s book Medical Women for India, she describes a plea in 1881, from the maharani of Panna to Queen Victoria asking about assistance in improving medical care for women in India. The following excerpt from the plea states, “Besides, she told her she hardly knew what good it would do if she could do as she wished and take her message to our Queen. The Queen could not make lady doctors, or order them to go out… If you will only tell our Queen what we Indian women suffer when we are sick, I am sure she will feel for us and try to help us” (Hoggan, 2). Sadly, even though the Indian women were advocating for their healthcare this plea received little response from the Indian Medical Service.

Although this plea didn’t receive much of a public response it received a response from one very important man, George A. Kittredge an American businessman in Bombay, who funded the movement of trained female physicians from Europe or North America to India. Kittredge believed in equalizing the medical field between women and men of their own sex. This means women could provide healthcare to women and men provide healthcare to men. After finding additional funding Kittredge had the funds to make a hospital for women and children in India, but the government of Bombay was reluctant to the idea of women running a hospital without male supervision (Arnold, 262). By 1883 Kittredge persuaded the government to allow the making of a hospital for women and children which was run by women.

Finding women licensed and educated in medicine was not easy. In Britain, women were not yet allowed to become doctors. They had to obtain their degrees out of the country and then when they returned they found it hard to obtain a job as only males were allowed to be physicians. In Hoggan’s address to the British Medical Association she describes this struggle. She states, “If, therefore, three-fourths of the whole of the members of the Association vote, without further agitation, that the crime of being a medical woman warrants my being deprived of that membership to which I have already been admitted, and which I claim never to have forfeited, in that case also I will resign” (Hoggan, 1878). This shows how women in Britain were not accepted as medical professionals. Indian women in need of healthcare by women provided the perfect outlet for women to prove themselves worthy in the medical field. This was a considerable movement for the rights of women doctors in Europe. At first, Indian women doctors were scarce, as the British wanted to maintain their white supremacy and rule over other races and cultures. They did this by educating European women doctors and not Indian. In Burton’s book, Contesting the Zenana: The mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874-1885, she states, “Britons were doctors, Indians were lesser-grade “hospital assistants” (Burton, 375-376). Soon however, this segregation and discrimination began to change. Bhadra states, “The lives of Indian women began to change significantly in the late nineteenth century when the colonial government, critical of the treatment of both Hindu and Muslim women, found allies in reformers, keen to reform their own society” (Bhadra, 20). This allowed women to become teachers and doctors after attending school and gaining their license.

So the question was, do we bring women European doctors over to India or do we wait seven years for Indian women to become doctors? The answer was unclear. During the late nineteenth century expansion of western medicine for women was being funded by the Dufferin Fund which was supplied by Lady Dufferin on command from Queen Victoria. This fund, like the Bombay fund supplied by Kittredge had its limitations. In Arnold’s book, Colonizing the Body, he states, “The progress which had recently been made in women’s medical education in Britain and North America made it possible to recruit women doctors abroad without having to wait several years for India to produce its own. But their availability had its price” (Arnold, 264). Arnold goes on to explain how the women who came to India were scarce because the pay was low, the living quarters weren’t desirable, and they were unable to speak to the native Indian women. European women doctors were criticized for being inadequate because they couldn’t speak the language of the natives, and had “racial arrogance and cultural ignorance” (Arnold, 265). On the other hand, Indian women who wanted to pursue medical professions were also criticized. Arnold states, “Women medical students had to battle against opposition from family and friends, against the low-caste and polluting associations of the medical profession, and the problems of finding suitable accommodations and transportation in unfamiliar cities” (Arnold, 267). Not only was keeping women doctors around a problem but the Dufferin Fund ran out of money to maintain women’s continuing education and employment in the medical field.

As a result, Hoggan along with many other revered women doctors proposed for a separate medical department for women doctors in India to try and raise funds and support women medicine. The government of Lord Dufferin refused to admit women as members of the IMS in 1908. Again the women appealed to the government in 1911 and after two years were rejected, but the government provided them with $150,000 for the Dufferin Fund to set up and administer their own service. It wasn’t until 1914 when women doctors in India were plentiful.

In conclusion, Britain had a mission to bring Western Medicine into India but maybe not on the terms which conspired. The British Empire, promoting paternalism as it colonized India didn’t take into consideration the culture in which it was colonizing. Because Indian women practice female seclusion and Western medicine only promoted male physicians, women lost the ability to seek medical attention. Although this led to a downfall in women’s health for a short time it ultimately led to the promotion of women’s education, rights, and professional status in Britain and in India. This led to the partial destruction of paternalism in the British Empire’s pursuit to colonize India.

Work Cited

Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century

India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Bhadra, Mita. "Indian Women in Medicine: An Enquiry Since 1880." Indian Anthropologist 41, no. 1

(2011): 17-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41921931.

Burton, Antoinette. "Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make "Lady Doctors for India," 1874-

1885." Journal of British Studies35, no. 3 (1996): 368-97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/175919.

Hoggan, Frances Elizabeth. “Medical Women for India.” The Journal of the National Indian

Association. (1882): 1-13

https://archive.org/details/b22304642

Photo:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Flickr_-_DFID_-_A_female_doctor_with_the_International_Medical_Corps_examines_a_woman_patient_at_a_mobile_health_clinic_in_Pakistan.jpg