"On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Indian woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside...

Susan LaFlesche Picotte was the first Native American doctor in the United States. She dedicated her life to working with Native American populations, battling epidemics from smallpox to tuberculosis that ravaged reservations during the final decades of the 19th century.