Emmeline da Cunha is considered to be Goa’s first female doctor. She completed her medical degree in Bombay in 1896, as the bubonic plague ...
Emmeline da Cunha is considered to be Goa’s first female doctor. She completed her medical degree in Bombay in 1896, as the bubonic plague broke out, and began her career in the port of this major city of British colonial India. She continued her studies in Florence, Newcastle and London, specialising in Bacteriology and Tropical Medicine, during her brief, but intense, medical career. Her cosmopolitan and contradictory life journey allows us to reflect on the complex connections between gender, science and colonialism.
Inaugurated in 1845, Grant Medical College was the first Western medical college to be created in British India. It began accepting female students almost four decades later, in 1884, a few years before several European universities did so (for example, Edinburgh University in 1889). Its first female graduate was Freny Cama, a member of Bombay’s prosperous and progressive Parsi community who passed from the college in 1892.
Four years later, six women concluded their medical degree: Manak Turkhad, another woman from the Parsi community; four Britons; and Emmeline da Cunha, an Indian woman of Portuguese nationality, who was born in Panjim and raised in Bombay by Goan Catholic parents.
During her studies, Emmeline da Cunha won several university prizes – the Sir James...
