Susan La Flesche Picotte's medical degree

Susan La Flesche was born on 17 June 1865 on the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska, the daughter of Joseph La Flesche (Iron Eye), a chief who urged his people to seek education, and his wife Mary (One Woman). As a child she watched a sick Indian woman die after a white doctor failed to come, and she later said this made her decide to become a physician.

She went to school on the reservation until she was 14, studied at the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey, and then taught at the Quaker mission school on the reservation. The ethnologist Alice Fletcher, whom she nursed there, urged her to continue her education. At Hampton Institute the resident physician, Martha Waldron, a graduate of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, encouraged her to apply there, and Fletcher secured scholarship money from the US Office of Indian Affairs and the Connecticut Indian Association. The National Library of Medicine describes her as the first person to receive federal aid for professional education.

She completed the three-year course in two years and graduated at the top of her class; the college's graduation announcement is dated 14 March 1889. After an internship at the Woman's Hospital in Philadelphia she worked on the Omaha Reservation as the tribe's physician for the Office of Indian Affairs, and from 1891 the Women's National Indian Association also named her its medical missionary to the Omaha. She saw patients in her office and travelled across the reservation on house calls until she resigned for health reasons in October 1893.

In 1894 she married Henry Picotte and opened a private practice in Bancroft, Nebraska, treating both white and non-white patients. She raised two sons and nursed her husband through a terminal illness, and in 1906 she led a delegation to Washington, D.C., to press for a ban on alcohol on the reservation.

In 1913 she opened a hospital in the reservation town of Walthill, which the National Park Service describes as the first hospital on a reservation not funded by the government. She died in Walthill on 18 September 1915. The building is known today as the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Memorial Hospital.