The photograph of the three magnificently dressed ladies who were students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, was snapped at a Dean’s reception, in 1885. Back then, women in the US still couldn't vote, nor were they encouraged to learn very much, and popular wisdom announced that studying was a threat to motherhood. Harvard gynecologist Edward H. Clarke wrote in 1873 that women who went to college risked “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system,” seemingly since a woman’s system never does two things well at the same time, as he said. In a report issued last year for PRI’s The World, credits were given to the 3 heroes for making the situation possible. Remembering America in the 19th century, Christopher Woolf, the News Editor of PRI's The World, says America was the inspirational beacon of freedom and equality when compared to the rest of the world. The first women’s medical college in the world, the WMCP was a magnet for ambitious ladies of all stripes. The three ladies in the photograph, Anandibai Joshi (India), Keiko Okami (Japan), and Sabat Islambouli (Syria), became the first licensed female doctors in their countries. According to Woolf’s report, Joshi is the best known of the three, perhaps because of how popular the medical profession is among Indians and Indian Americans. He also points out that what impelled her to pursue medicine was the death of her 10-day old baby, a tragedy that struck when she herself was only 14. Keiko Okami received aid from the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church to study at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Okami also worked at various hospitals, then opened her own clinic, and her own hospital which closed after nine years. As for Sabat Islambouli, she is believed to have gone back to Damascus, and then was in Cairo, Egypt, in 1919 according to the alumnae list of that year. After that contacts were lost with her and what happened to her remains unknown. However, a doctor, a woman to be specific of Syrian origin should be remembered for having crossed the many limitations evident during those times.