That nation could not stomach the thought of, trivial as it was, common as it is today, a woman pursuing the sciences. Early 1900s India was a place where your gender determined what you could be in life. This antediluvian thought though, this kind of restriction was only the cause of a temporary disruption Mary Poonen Lukose’s path to glory.
Mary Poonen Lukose went on to build the scaffolding of modern public health in Travancore, one that can be attributed to the many advances that Kerala has achieved today in health care indicators. Mary Poonen Lukose is one of the most talented people in the development of Kerala’s health system.’ Acknowledging her contributions, in the 2018 budget speech, the finance minister of the State said, on record, in the House: ‘Dr.
Her work helped lay the ground for what we now celebrate as the “Kerala model” of health—fronting strong primary care, institutional childbirth, public health outreach, and unusually good social indicators.
It is inescapable irony that India’s first woman Surgeon General Mary Poonen Lukose was not allowed to study science. Nevermind how bright she was, her gender was a disqualifier as Maharaja College in Tiruvananthapuram declined her admission to the sciences. She, of course, decided to come home and blazed a path of glory, only long forgotten. The CUP article further quotes from an autobiographical note penned by Mary herself: “In her autobiographical essay, Mary Poonen Lukose reflects on her decision to become a doctor. She traces it to her early experiences helping out in hospitals where her father worked as a doctor, and to his example and influence on her. ‘As I grew up, he made it a point to instill into me the spirit of service to humanity. At the Women and Children Hospital in Thycaud, Mary worked as an obstetrician and superintendent, initiating daughters of local birth attendants into training midwifery, an attempt to subsume traditional midwifery into scientific deliveries and maternal care.
Born in Ayamanam (incidentally, Arundathi Roy’s backdrop in the God of Small Things ) in Kottayam in 1886, Mary was so bright, she topped the matriculation exam. Only a temporary detour, Mary went on to get a degree in history, becoming the first woman from Travancore to graduate from Madras University in 1909. She earned an MBBS from the University of London in 1915, trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, and studied paediatrics at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Reports of her life, rendered through an autobiographical account, T railblazer, r eleased in 2020, record Mary as working hard in Dublin at the Rotunda Hospital, coping with the increasing work load created by the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914. When her mentor and guide, her father passed away in 1916, Mary was shattered; she had to take a call on whether she would continue in England or come back home to serve her people. She returned to Travancore in 1916 as its first woman doctor. Some historic references to her indicate she performed Travancore’s first Caesarean section before 1920, reportedly sometimes working only by the light of a hurricane-lamp light.
However, her family could afford to send her to London to pursue medicine, and she was the first Indian woman to graduate in Medicine from the University of London, according to an article published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) as part of a compendium of Modern Asian Studies.
