Susan La Flesche Picotte

Susan La Flesche Picotte was a physician and reformer of the Omaha Nation in Nebraska, and is recognized as the first Native American woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, which she completed in 1889. She returned to serve her own community, at times acting as the sole physician for well over a thousand Omaha people spread across a large reservation area, while also campaigning against tuberculosis and alcohol abuse and teaching hygiene and sanitation. In 1913 she opened a hospital at Walthill, the first privately funded hospital built on a Native American reservation, after federal officials repeatedly declined to fund one themselves.