Photo: Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Born in a tipi in 1865 on the Omaha reservation, Susan La Flesche Picotte became the reservation’s first medical doctor, treating 1,244 patients across the 1,300-square-mile reservation and building the first hospital on a reservation in 1913. Now, more than a century later, after extensive fundraising and restoration, the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center will again be a place where the tribe’s members and nonmembers can get medical care in Nebraska’s poorest county. The 24 year old, who graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1889, delivered babies and treated the elderly, founded the first library for children, promoted hygiene, and testified before Congress about whiskey peddlers selling alcohol on the reservation. She raised $9,000 to build the Presbyterian Memorial Hospital and worked there for two years before she died aged 50 in 1915.
|
|
More:
