National
Women Physicians day is celebrated on February 3rd, coinciding with
the birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell—the first female physician in the United
States. This year I would like to tell
you about Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American women to earn
a medical degree in the United States. She was the quintessential family physician,
serving in limitless capacity for her people, the Omaha. Throughout her life,
she focused on public health issues, ardently fought for Omaha land rights, wrote
for her local newspaper, and never gave up the fight for social justice.
La Flesche’s
motivation to pursue medicine came from a haunting experience she had as a
child, watching an elderly woman die in agony awaiting the arrival of a local
doctor. Despite being summoned four
times, he never came. In her opinion,
the doctor’s absence made one thing painfully clear: It was only an
Indian. She wrote years later, “It has
always been a desire of mine to study medicine ever since I was a small girl.”
Susan’s
Father, Joseph LaFlesche, known as Iron Eye, served as the last Chief of the
Omaha tribe. Iron Eye encouraged his children to become educated so they stayed
true to their Omaha culture, yet understood both worlds. At 14, Susan moved halfway across the country
to attend the Hampton Institute, in Virginia, where she graduated as
salutatorian. Hampton graduates were expected to return to their reservations to
become wives and mothers.
Instead, LaFlesche
applied and was accepted at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Medical
school was expensive, so LaFlesche appealed to the Connecticut Indian
Association, who sponsored her medical school expenses, housing, books and
other supplies. It should come as no
surprise Dr. LaFlesche was valedictorian of her graduating class in 1889. Thereafter, she accepted the position of
government physician at the Omaha Agency Indian School, a boarding school run
by the Office of Indian Affairs, which had a government salary of $500.00 per
year. While not obligated to care for
the broader community, LaFlesche became the sole doctor for 1,244 patients
spread across a massive 1,350 square mile area. Her office space in the corner
of the schoolyard doubled as a community meeting place. She was widely trusted in the community as a
doctor, but also served as their lawyer, accountant, pastor and political
liaison.
La Flesche
routinely put in 20-hour workdays making house calls by navigating her horse
drawn buggy through terrain blanketed with snow and biting subzero winds while wrapped
in a buffalo robe. When she returned
home, “Dr. Sue” often found a line of wheezing and coughing patients awaiting
her. At night, while sleeping, a lantern lit in her window served as a beacon
for those sick with tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, dysentery, and
diphtheria.
In 1894,
LaFlesche married Henry Picotte and they had two sons: Caryl and Pierre. Flouting convention, Picotte continued practicing
medicine after the birth of her children and took them with her on house calls. Her most important crusade was against
tuberculosis, which killed hundreds of Omaha, including her husband in
1905.
After being
widowed, La Flesche’s role expanded to defender of Omaha land interests. She
became outraged when the federal government reneged on the Omaha Allotment Act. She wrote letters to the Office of Indian
Affairs and harshly critical newspaper articles continuing to work on her
community's behalf until the end of her life.
It was during
a summer measles epidemic—during which the tribe lost 87 members, mostly
children—that La Flesche began to dream about building a hospital on the Omaha
reservation. A fundraising campaign
generated enough private donations to build the hospital and even furnish many
of the rooms. The Susan Picotte La
Flesche Hospital in Walthill, Nebraska—completed in 1913—was the very first
privately funded hospital built on a reservation in the United States. In 1993, it was declared a National Historic
Landmark. In 2018, the hospital was
named one of the top endangered places by the National Trust. A fundraising effort is currently underway to
pay for restoration of this historically significant building.
It is
difficult to determine whether Dr. La Flesche faced greater discrimination as a
Native American or as a woman. La
Flesche died in September 1915, four years before women were granted the right
to vote and nine years before she could claim citizenship in the land where she
was born and raised. Omaha means
“against the current.” In her lifetime, Dr. La Flesche broke many gender,
racial, and economic barriers, but more importantly, she straddled two
completely different worlds successfully:
Native and White, Omaha and Victorian, and motherhood and medicine. She was born in a tipi on the Nebraska
plains, attended summer buffalo hunts with her family, and rode bareback across
the reservation, by the time she became a physician, she had also lived in the
big city, attended symphonies, and ridden in horse-drawn carriages on
cobblestone streets. What I found most
inspiring about Dr. Susan La Flesche was her tenacity. No matter the obstacle
she faced, her spirit was never broken. May every one of us remain as resolute
in our lifetime as Dr. La Flesche.
To learn
more about how Susan La Flesche overcame racial and gender inequality to become
America’s first native physician, read “A Warrior of the People” by Joe
Starita.