Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte

Virtual talk on ZOOM

with Joseph Starita

 

Joseph Starita’s informative and fascinating talk about Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte is available on the Mansion’s YouTube Channel

 

Pulitzer Prize nominee Joseph Starita talks about Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American doctor in U. S. History. On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte 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 Native woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick―tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, influenza―families scattered miles apart, whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs.
This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice, then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people―physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually.