Susan La Flesche Picotte- The First Native American Physician

From Vision Maker Media: "Medicine Woman interweaves the lives of Native American women healers of today with the story of America's first Native doctor, Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865-1915).

Susan La Fleshe Picotte was the first Native American women to receive her medical degree. She was born on June 17, 1865 on the Omaha reservation. Susan’s father, Joseph La Flesche, also known as Iron Eye, was the last chief of the Omaha and a major influence in Susan’s life. He was largely influential in Susan and his other children pursuing an education, in fact he encouraged all his people including his children to pursue an education.

While teaching at a Quaker Missionary School on the Omaha Reservation, Susan La Felsche nursed an ill ethnologist and friend of the Omaha, Alice Fletcher back to health. Fletcher later encouraged La Flesche to go back to school and get her medical degree. In 1886, Susan began attending the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She graduated one year early in 1889 at the top of her class.

After completing her medical degree, Dr. La Flesche went back to the Omaha Reservation where she served as the only doctor and cared for over one thousand people. While working on the reservation, she was able to see the changes that living in a world influenced by European culture was hurting her people. She worked hard to help the people on the Omaha reservation understand and make the changes to keep themselves healthy. During her time on the reservation, Dr. La Flesche sent a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs about her concern involving alcoholism and tuberculosis.

In 1894, Susan La Flesche married Henry Picotte. Susan and Henry had two sons, Carl and Pierre. After Susan married Henry, they moved to Bancroft, Nebraska where she opened her own private practice. There she provided medical care for both Native Americans and Europeans. Susan also cared for her family, her sickly mother and her ill husband. When her husband died in 1905, Dr.Picotte and her two sons moved to Walthill, Nebraska where they assisted in building a house and a hospital. This hospital was the first hospital on a reservation that was not funded by the United States Government. The hospital that was built for Susan La Flesche’s was open until the late 1940’s. It would later serve as an elderly care center. In 1989, the hospital was restored and now displays many photos and artifacts from Dr. Picotte’s life. It memorializes and commemorates her medical work and her life, a life dedicated to the care of her people. 

Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte spent much of her life learning about health care and using that knowledge to care for the people of the Omaha Nation through education and caring for their medical needs. At 50 years old, Susan La Flesche Picotte died. She passed away on September 18, 1915 after fighting an illness for three years.  While on her death bed, dying of cancer brought on by constant ear infections, Dr. Picotte received a package from the remarkable Noble Peace Prize Winning Scientist, Marie Curie. In the weeks before, Susan’s Sister and Brother In-Law had written a letter to Madam Curie, they had heard she’d discovered radium and knew that Marie Curie believed it could help relieve pain and possibly cure cancer. Inside the small package, placed inside a lead lined box was a tiny pellet of radium. In Dr. Picotte’s bedroom, the agency doctor placed the small piece of radium inside her ear. By mistake, the small pellet slips into her ear canal and takes hours to retrieve. Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte passes away soon afterwards and would have passed away anyway. Her body laid in state, in the very home that she had designed herself.

Susan La Flesche Picotte was a remarkable woman who inspired and paved the way for countless Native men and woman to enter the field of medicine and science.  

The first Native American doctor and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize connect through a pellet of poison.

Susan La Flesche Picotte. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2020, from http://www.nebraskastudies.org/en/1875-1899/susan-la-flesche-picotte-first-na-female-physician/