Susan La Flesche Picotte
Omaha Indigenous physician and reformer (1865–1915)
Susan La Flesche Picotte was a Native American medical doctor and reformer and member of the Omaha tribe. She is widely acknowledged as one of the first Indigenous people, and the first Indigenous woman, to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe. She served as a physician to over 1,200 Omaha people on the reservation, working under conditions of significant pay disparity compared to white government doctors. In 1913, after no Commissioner of Indian Affairs during her life supported government-funded hospital for Native Americans, she founded the Walthill Hospital, the first privately funded hospital on a Native American reservation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Susan La Flesche Picotte” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.