First Indian woman to practise Western medicine in India

Sir,

The paper on Dr Kadambini Bose Ganguly (1861–1923) by Verma and colleagues contains several points which require clarification. ¹

Noting that the vast majority of Bengali women in the nineteenth century were illiterate, the authors write that, ‘Some women were able to receive minimal education through the Zenana, a private tutor who taught women how to read, write and manage minor accounts’. The zenana was not a person and had nothing to do with education per se, being that physical part of an observant Hindu or Muslim household which practised purdah and to which, with the exception of very close male relatives, only other women were permitted entry. ² Some observant women were well educated because their husbands arranged that they should have sufficient knowledge to take care of property and other important matters in the event of the husband's untimely death. Others appointed Vaishnavis (women followers of the sixteenth-century Vaisnav saint Shri Chaitanya) to teach women at home. ³

The authors assert that ‘traditional Indian medicine … advocated an imbalance in humours as the cause of diseases’. This was certainly true of Unani medicine, which was practised mainly by Muslim hakims and which was based on the humoral system of medicine devised by Hippocrates and Galen but further modified by Arabian and Persian physicians, such as Rhazes (al Razi), Avicenna (Ibn-e-Sina), Al-Zahrawi (Albucasi), Ibn Nafis and others. ⁴ However, Ayurvedic medicine, which was practised mainly by the more numerous Hindu vaidyas, was a system based on ancient Sanskrit texts. These texts, which contained many religious elements, sought to maintain a perfect physiological and mental equilibrium within the body by the use of ritual, through control of the mind by the use of yoga, meditation and similar practices and by treatment with drugs based on plants, minerals and metals. ⁵

The committee set up in 1833 by Lord William Bentinck (1774–1839), who was not only Governor-General of Bengal from 1828 to 1834, as indicated in this paper, but also the first Governor-General of India from 1834 to 1835, had a much wider remit than is suggested by the present authors. It has, however, been well summarised by Gorman. ⁶ In essence, Bentinck was a utilitarian who sought to establish the principle (only occasionally followed by his successors) that India should be governed primarily for the benefit of the Indians. ⁶ In this instance, he used the reform of medical education as an initial step towards the wider reform of medical practice in general.

The authors refer to the purdah system as though it were the only reason which prevented observant women from obtaining medical attention from male doctors. However, in nineteenth-century India, purdah was, numerically, a relatively minor barrier to seeking medical attention because only a small number of women were able to observe purdah, the great majority having to leave the house to contribute to the family finances. Rather than purdah, it was custom and preference, often at the insistence of husbands, which stopped many Indian women from seeing medical assistance, though some women, especially those from lower castes, did seek help from male doctors. ⁷

The authors’ suggestion that women who contracted sexually transmitted diseases from British troops would be prevented by purdah from receiving treatment seems improbable because, if they were observant, they would not have been consorting with British troops in the first place. The Indian prostitutes who serviced the British army usually did so from financial necessity, and many were concentrated in the semi-official lal bazaars or red light districts adjacent to the military cantonments. ⁸

Neither of the two references provided as evidence of Florence Nightingale's interest in Ganguly gives a reference to Nightingale's original letter, which is perhaps why the letter is slightly misquoted in the present paper. The original reference is in a letter from Nightingale to Dr Mary Scharlieb, written on 20 February 1888 and cited by McDonald and Vallée. ⁹