On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson awarded Dr. Mary Edwards Walker the Medal of Honor. She remains the only woman to have received it. A graduate of Syracuse Medical College, Walker offered her medical skills to the Union cause during the Civil War. Denied a military commission because she was a woman, she served first as a volunteer physician and later as a civilian contract surgeon with the Army of the Cumberland.
Walker challenged conventions of dress as well as the barriers facing women in medicine. Finding traditional women’s clothing impractical for her work, she wore trousers beneath a modified dress and an officer’s coat. She crossed battle lines to care for soldiers and civilians, and in April 1864 Confederate forces captured her. Held at Castle Thunder prison in Richmond, Virginia, she endured four months of confinement before her release in a prisoner exchange that August.
Her struggle for recognition continued long after the war. In 1917, an Army review board rescinded her Medal of Honor alongside those of 910 other recipients. Walker’s civilian status—not a lack of valuable wartime service—was the basis for removing her from the honor roll. She refused to return the medal and continued wearing it until her death in 1919. In 1977, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, her award was restored. The reversal formally recognized a distinction Walker herself had never surrendered.
