Small Wonders: Dr. Sue

Susan LaFlesche (standing)

Susan La Flesche Picotte simply could not have dreamed of a hospital as a girl. She wouldn't have known what a hospital was. Her father was a mover-and-a-shaker on the Omaha reservation, a mixed blood leader who'd spent sufficient time away from the reservation to note the overwhelming numbers of white folks in St. Louis and elsewhere, in volume that would destroy the culture of the Omaha people if they did not drastically change their beloved way of life.

Susan La Flesche Picotte could not have dreamed of a hospital as a girl either, because she wouldn't have given a thought to a "career," wouldn't have known what a career was when she went to the reservation mission school the Presbyterians ran, or when, unlike most Omaha girls, but like her older sisters before her, she'd boarded the train for the east, for Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she attended a school for girls, far from her reservation home.

She loved New Jersey, but she dreamed always of going home and becoming a teacher in the world she so much missed. At the Elizabeth Institute, she proved an apt student, smart as a whip; but a half a continent away from her family and her people beside the wide Missouri, she dreamed of little more than a classroom where she could be the teacher her people's children needed to help them through all those changes. 

In 1884, when she was 19 years old, she went out east again, this time to Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia, a school who declared their mission to train African-Americans to be teachers and leaders of their newly freed people, where the very first class was taught under an sprawling oak that still stands, "the Emancipation Oak." When Hampton admitted Native American students also, Susan, her sister Maguerite, and other Omaha children enrolled. At Hampton, Susan distinguished herself quickly and graduated as the salutatorian of her class.

At Hampton she first dreamed about medicine. In 1886, on the reservation it would not have been strange for a woman to be a healer, but most Euro-Americans considered a woman doctor unthinkable because medicine required an acquaintance with the human body and its functions that was thought, well, unladylike. But her friends encouraged her to apply to one of the few medical schools that would accept women. When she did, she was accepted, and once again distinguished herself by graduating three years later at the top of her class.

In 1888, when Susan La Fleshe Picotte became the first female Native American doctor, it's still unlikely she dreamed of a hospital. She wanted only to go home and help her people with an epidemic of measles that, back then, was a dreaded killer. She told her friends and supporters back east that she wanted to teach and practice medicine and public health, and live with her family among people she loved.

And that's what she did, both on the reservation and off, treating white folks and Native, the very first female Native American doctor, who practiced right here in rural Nebraska.

And that has to be when her strong dream of a hospital haunted her, because, on horseback or by buggy, to get to Walthill from Bancroft took hours back then; and emergencies abounded around the reservation, even--maybe especially--in unforgiving January cold or blazing summer heat. When she and her husband had children and his farm work meant he couldn't stay with the kids, Dr. Sue bundled her kids along, even in bitter cold. For years, Dr. Susan La Fleshe Picotte kept an office but spent hours and days on end in that buggy, visiting patients and handling emergencies in an area of 450 square miles. At that time, the dream of hospital would not let her alone.

Even though she was still young, her own health slowly and painfully became an issue. A thousand patients and a 20-hour workdays depleted her strength. Chronic illnesses led to her loss of hearing; a fall from her horse left her unsteady and weakened just at the time in the life of Dr. Sue when a hospital became more than a dream.  

In 1913, when she was 48 years old, a spacious new community hospital was completed and dedicated in Walthill, a regional facility with two general wards, five private wards, a maternity ward and an operating room, a beautiful building designed with wonderful windows and large open spaces, created to serve both Native- and Euro-Americans.

Although she nurtured that dream herself into being, she couldn't lead it when the hospital opened--she couldn't. Two years after the hospital opened, Susan La Flesche Picotte passed away from the bone cancer that had ravaged her body for so many of the last years.

Today, this wonderful historic place, the dream of the first Native American doctor, up on a hill in Walthill, NE, is being restored and refurbished, as it should be, with a mission to bring peace and healing to all the communities around the world Dr. Sue so loved.