Anandibai Joshi was married at the age of nine, as was common practice in her community in nineteenth-century India, and gave birth to a child at fourteen who died within days due to inadequate medical care available at the time — an experience she later cited directly as the reason she wanted to become a doctor herself, so other women would not lose children to the same lack of access.
At a time when formal medical education for Indian women essentially did not exist, and when a long overseas voyage alone was considered scandalous for a woman of her background, she traveled by ship to the United States in 1883, without her husband accompanying her, to enroll at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.
She studied in a foreign country, in an unfamiliar climate, while also managing chronic tuberculosis that had already begun affecting her health before she left India, pushing forward with her coursework despite repeated illness and the isolation of being far from family and community for years at a time.
In 1886, she graduated with a medical degree, becoming the first woman from India to earn one, a moment covered in press on both sides of the world. She returned to India already severely ill, and died the following year at just twenty-two, without ever practicing medicine in her home country — a life cut short just as the goal she had crossed an ocean for was finally within reach.