Susan La Flesche Picotte

Because federal officials repeatedly declined to fund one. Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Native American woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, completing it in 1889, and she returned to serve her own Omaha community, at times acting as the sole physician for well over a thousand Omaha people spread across a large reservation area. After the government would not pay for a hospital, she raised the money herself, and in 1913 she opened a hospital at Walthill, the first privately funded hospital built on a Native American reservation. She also campaigned against tuberculosis and alcohol abuse and taught hygiene and sanitation among her patients.