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Jun 17, 2020 · My List. Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first American Indian woman to graduate from medical school, and is notable for founding an independently funded hospital on the Omaha reservation in ...
- 12 min
- Overview
- HISTORY Vault: Native American History
Susan La Flesche shattered not just one barrier, but two, to become the first Native American woman doctor in the United States in the 1880s.
Eight-year-old Susan La Flesche sat at the bedside of an elderly woman, puzzled as to why the doctor had yet to arrive. After all, he had been summoned four times, and four times he had promised to come straight away. As the night grew longer, the sick woman’s breathing grew fainter until she died in agony before the break of dawn. Even to a young girl, the message delivered by the doctor’s absence was painfully clear: “It was only an Indian.”
That searing moment stoked the fire inside Susan to one day heal the fellow members of her Omaha tribe. “It has always been a desire of mine to study medicine ever since I was a small girl,” she wrote years later, “for even then I saw the need of my people for a good physician.”
8 Incredible Inventions of the Indigenous People of the Americas
Born in a buckskin teepee on the Omaha Indian Reservation in northeast Nebraska on June 17, 1865, Susan was never given a traditional Omaha name by her mixed-race parents. Her father, Chief Joseph La Flesche (also known as “Iron Eye”), believed his children as well as his tribe were now living in a white man’s world in which change would be the only constant. “As the chief guardian of welfare, he realized they would have to adapt to white ways or simply cease to survive,” says Joe Starita, author of A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor. “He began an almost intense indoctrination of his four daughters. They would have to speak English and go to white schools.”
While Iron Eye insisted that Susan learn the tribe’s traditional songs, beliefs, customs and language in order to retain her Omaha identity, he also sent her to a Presbyterian mission school on the reservation where she learned English and became a devout Christian. At the age of 14, she was sent east to attend a girls’ school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, followed by time at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, where she took classes with the children of former slaves and other Native Americans.
From Comanche warriors to Navajo code talkers, learn more about Indigenous history.
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Mar 1, 2017 · Standing at the vanguard of medical education, the WMCP was the first medical school in the country established for women. If she graduated, La Flesche would become the country’s first Native ...
- Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler. Crumpler is considered the first Black woman physician in the U.S. She started out as a nurse but physicians she worked with encouraged her to go to medical school and wrote her recommendation letters.
- Dr. May Chinn. Chinn was one of the first Black female physicians in Harlem—in addition to being a talented musician; she played piano with the famous Harlem Renaissance entertainer Paul Robeson.
- Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston. Gaston was the first Black woman to direct a major public health agency, when she became the head of the Bureau of Primary Health Care at the United States Department of Health and Human Services in 1990.
In October 1847, Blackwell was accepted to Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York. The dean and faculty, usually responsible for evaluating an applicant for matriculation, initially were unable to make a decision due to Blackwell's gender.
- British and American
- 31 May 1910 (aged 89), Hastings, England
- 3 February 1821, Bristol, England
- Geneva Medical College
In 1845 Elizabeth Blackwell, a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher living in Cincinnati, Ohio, decided that she wanted to become a medical doctor. At that time, no woman had ever graduated from a medical school in the United States or western Europe.
Nov 2, 2023 · Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive an M.D., earned while the Civil War raged, and the first Black person in the country to write a medical book, a popular ...
