On March 18, 1889, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte becomes the first Native American woman to graduate from medical school. She was top of her class at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. 

As an eight-year-old on Nebraska’s Omaha Reservation, La Flesche experienced a formative moment: staying at the bedside of an elderly Omaha woman in agonizing pain, waiting all night for the white doctor to arrive. The woman died overnight and the doctor never appeared.

“It was only an Indian and it [did] not matter,” she later recalled—had the old woman been white, La Flesche intuited, the doctor would have hurried over at the first notice.

La Flesche went on to study at Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and, at 24, graduated a year early. While her colleagues encouraged her to stay and practice medicine on the East Coast, she returned home to Nebraska with the intent of serving her community.  Soon after, she became the sole physician for more than 1,200 people in the Omaha and nearby Winnebago Tribes, across over 400 miles. After she married in 1894 and had two sons, she continued to serve patients across the reservation, taking her children on house calls as needed.

In 1913, with help of her husband and donations, La Flesche opened up the first privately funded hospital on a reservation. She intended to help anyone who needed it, white or Native.

Source: history.com for the complete article