Edith Brown, an English doctor, founded a medical school for women at Ludhiana in 1894. It was the first institution in Asia to train women as doctors.
The reasoning was practical: Indian women in purdah would not be examined by male doctors, so there was an entire population with no medical care available to it, and the only solution was women doctors.
It began with four students. It became the Christian Medical College and Hospital, which is now one of the larger teaching hospitals in northern India and admits men and women.
Its graduates staffed mission and government hospitals across India, and a very large proportion of the first two generations of Indian women doctors trained there or at its counterpart at Vellore.
Punjab therefore has, in Ludhiana, the origin of women's medical education in Asia, and it is not on any list of things the state is known for.
Edith Brown ran it for forty-two years and is buried at Ludhiana.
The North India School of Medicine for Christian Women, as it was first called, taught in Urdu, because the students it wanted did not have English and neither did the patients. Teaching medicine in an Indian language was ordinary then and is not possible now.
It runs one of the largest hospitals in the region and its nursing school is among the oldest in India.
It is run by a society of church bodies rather than by a government, so it has had to find its own money for a century and a quarter. That it is still among the best hospitals in north India on that basis is the part worth stating.