I have read a few Western books on the history of women in medicine, and honestly have not enjoyed any of them as much as I enjoyed Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors. While Rao does early Western women doctors the courtesy of including them in her historic account, none of the Western accounts I have read included women doctors from non-Western countries. I actually think this is the first book about the history of women in medicine that I did not DNF.

While I started reading Lady Doctors because of the medical history (and my profession), I was also gripped by the history of India, her independence and her women. It is both insightful and incredibly well researched. I learned more about the history of India than I have from any other book. It is well-written to boot, with an engaging writing style and sharp assessments of historic sources - perhaps the very factor that carried me through to the conclusion.

initially waited to read this book since I’ve already read an entire book on one of the chapters, Anandibai Joshi. It turned out that this book was more than just about Western medicine in India.

The author begins with the title she chose for the book and highlights what the combination of the two words meant at the time and the weight that that carried. After talking about all the rest briefly, six women’s lives are discussed. Some were almost contemporaries while there was some time between the others. The actions of a couple impacted the lives of the others as well.

This book is a detailed account of what life in India was at that time and the multiple hoops women especially had to jump through. I will not go into further detail because that is what the book does.

There are some parts of the discussion where I felt like the author’s bias might have been stronger than other parts of the content. It was not off-putting exactly but the thought stuck with me. The research done is well detailed.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes non-fiction regardless of specific interest in early Allopathic medicine and Indian Women who became doctors.

I received an ARC thanks to Netgalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I loved this book! It was really interesting and I learnt so much about the struggles of studying/working in medicine as a woman in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries.
My favourite thing about this book was the structure. Each chapter being dedicated to a biography of a different woman made the book really engaging and fast paced. Each chapter felt new and like it was adding more insight and information, given the breadth of personalities and backgrounds of the women covered.
Overall I would definitely recommend this book.
The only thing I think could have been improved would be an opening chapter that provided historical and social context to the time period covered in the book, as not everyone reading this book will have knowledge of Indian society and governance at this time.