Who was Anandi Gopal Joshi? Google Doodle remembers India’s first female doctor

ANANDI Joshi may not be a name many people in the UK are familiar with - but she remains hugely significant in India to this day.

Here's why the doctor is being celebrated with a Google Doodle on what would have been her 153rd birthday.

Who was Anandi Joshi?

Anandi Joshi was the first female Indian doctor to graduate with a medicine degree from an American university.

She was born in Yamuna, India, on March 31st, 1885, and was married by the age of nine to Gopalrao Joshi, a widower almost 20 years older than her.

By the age of 14 she had given birth to her first child - but the tot only lived for ten days due to substandard medical care.

It was this heartbreak that inspired her to go into medicine, and with the encouragement of her husband she started writing letters to well-known missionaries.

She was eventually offered a place at Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Despite battling illness and persecution from orthodox Indians back home, she graduated from medical college in 1885.

She returned to India and was immediately put in charge of the Albert Edward Hospital in Kolhapur.

But within a year she was dead from tuberculosis at just 22.

Her death was mourned throughout india despite the early opposition to her decision to study in the West, and her ashes were placed in the family cemetery in New York.

She is depicted in the doodle - created by Bangalore-based artist Kashmira Sarode - as obtaining her degree in Pennsylvania.

What is a Google Doodle?

In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second 'o' of Google as a message to that they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.

The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.

In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the 'o's for Halloween the following year.

Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.

Among the Doodles published recently were ones commemorating German scientist Robert Koch, Jan Ingenhousz (who discovered photosynthesis) and the 50th anniversary of kids coding languages being introduced.

In 2017, the search giant celebrated the Autumn Equinox , which marked the official ending of summer and the coming of autumn.