New York
Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832 Oswego Town, New York. Mary’s father was a farmer and a self-taught doctor. Mary had the desire to enter the medical profession and to become a doctor like her father, and to that end graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1853. She practiced medicine in Rome, New York, although the country was not quite ready to accept a woman doctor.
When the Civil War began Dr. Walker worked as an unpaid hospital volunteer, then she worked for two years on the front lines of the Union army as a field surgeon, in such places as Chattanooga and Fredericksburg. In 1863 she was appointed an assistant Army surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. She was the first woman surgeon in the United States Army. She treated soldiers and civilians alike. Since she treated civilians she frequently traveled outside of Union lines, during one of these trips she was captured by the Confederate Army and arrested as a spy. She was freed along with several other Union doctors in a prisoner exchange for Confederate surgeons.
On November 11, 1865 Dr. Mary Edwards Walker received the Congressional Medal of Honor for meritorious service to her country. Her citation cites her valuable service to her government as earnest and illustrious. That she faithfully served as contract surgeon and has devoted herself with much patriotic zeal in the care for the sick and wounded soldiers in her care.
Further, Dr. Walker performed her duties to the detriment of her own health and safety, and endured the hardships as a prisoner of war for four months in a Confederate prison.
Dr. Walker was a women way ahead of her time, she was a radical women’s libber a hundred years before the burning of bras. In 1917 her Congressional Medal of honor was revoked because of s change in the way the medal was to be awarded based on actual combat. Dr. Walker however, refused to relinquish her medal and in fact wore it every day. She felt that the decision to take her medal away was an act of discrimination against women of the time.
President Jimmy Carter reinstated Dr. Walker’s medal posthumously based on her “Distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication, and loyalty to her country.