Grace Ilahi-Baksh, MD

Grace Ilahi-Baksh, MD, is an alumna who earned her medical degree from the University at Buffalo in 1914.

Ilahi-Baksh was originally from Bombay (now Mumbai), India. She came to the United States with her parents around the start of the 20th century. She studied liberal arts and medicine at Syracuse University before joining UB’s medical school. 

Ilahi-Baksh worked to educate people in the U.S. about the need for women’s medical care in India. She wrote articles and gave lectures to spread awareness about the caste system and health challenges faced by women in India.

In a paper published in the May 1910 issue of Women’s Medical Journal, Ilahi-Baksh urged female physicians to consider providing health care in India. She wrote: 

“… It is a fact that thousands of women die annually throughout India for the want of proper medical attention. Such are the prejudices that a man physician is rarely called to attend a woman, and frequently they declare they would rather die than be driven to such an extremity … The death rate among women and children is enormous … A medical woman in every populous center is one of the most urgent needs of India, an agency which shall find its way into those dark secluded dwellings, where fever, ophthalmia and other ills breed unchecked.”

Ilahi-Baksh wrote the powerful article, which is titled “Medical Women Needed in India,” while she was a student.

While Ilahi-Baksh was in medical school at UB, local residents were impressed to read in the newspaper that the school had students from as far away as India. 

“Most students were residents of Western New York, other parts of the state, and nearby areas of Ontario and Pennsylvania, which were populated mostly by European immigrants and their descendants,” according to the book “Another Era: A Pictorial History of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences State University of New York at Buffalo.”