The National Medal of Honor Museum is one of several museums and historic institutions helping preserve and share the legacy of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. Her story reaches far beyond the Medal of Honor, spanning medicine, military service, women's rights, and a lifetime of advocacy for greater equality.

In April 1864, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was several miles beyond Federal (Union) lines in northern Georgia when she was captured by Confederate troops.

She had been traveling through the surrounding countryside treating civilians—work that routinely took her away from the relative safety of her post with the 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Walker understood the risk. When she traveled with an escort, the officers and orderlies were armed, and she carried two revolvers in her saddle. When she went alone, she deliberately left the weapons behind.

If Confederate troops stopped her, she knew being captured while armed could make an already dangerous situation worse.

Still, she went.

“The people expressed so much gratitude,” Walker later recalled, “that I lost all fear of anything being done to myself.”

By the time Walker was captured, she had spent nearly three years trying to do what she had trained to do: practice medicine in service of the Federal Army.

Getting there was a different story—and one worth telling.

A Different Kind of Doctor

Mary Edwards Walker was born November 26, 1832, near Oswego, New York, one of seven children raised by Alvah and Vesta Walker.

Education mattered in the Walker household, especially for the family’s five daughters. Her father amassed a collection of medical books while looking for ways to help his wife through illnesses associated with her pregnancies. He became interested in eclectic medicine, an approach that emphasized diet, exercise, hygiene, and botanical remedies.

The Walkers encouraged their children to think independently and placed unusual emphasis on education, health, and physical activity—ideas Mary would carry into adulthood. Years later, she would look back proudly on the “innovative education” her parents had fostered and the work her sisters had continued as educators.

Walker attended Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York, a coeducational institution where female students could study subjects including physiology and hygiene—topics not commonly considered appropriate for women at the time.

Then, in 1853, Walker and her father traveled to Syracuse Medical College, where she continued her pursuit. She was entering a profession with few precedents for women. Elizabeth Blackwell had become the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree only four years earlier. Although Syracuse had admitted other women, many did not complete the program. Walker did—at the age of 22 in 1855.

The degree opened a door, but it did not guarantee that patients—or the medical establishment—would walk through it. Women physicians of Walker’s generation still faced resistance to their training, limited opportunities for clinical experience, and skepticism about whether women belonged in medicine at all.

She opened a medical practice in New York and continued building a professional life as a physician, treating women and children. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, she had spent six years establishing herself in a field that offered women few easy points of entry.

The war would create an urgent need for doctors.

It would not immediately change who the Army believed could be one.

A Different Kind of Active Duty

When the Civil War began in 1861, Walker went to Washington, D.C., and offered the Federal Army something it urgently needed: a trained physician.

When the Army would not commission her as a surgeon, Walker went to work anyway.

She volunteered in military hospitals, caring for sick and wounded soldiers without government pay. Over the next several years, her service took her closer to the fighting, including to field hospitals in Virginia and Tennessee. Still without a commission—and the official standing and compensation it would provide—Walker continued practicing medicine wherever she could be useful while pressing military officials for formal recognition.

At times, that came at a personal cost.

By early 1864, Walker served as physician and surgeon for the Women's Relief Association in Washington, D.C., where she treated impoverished patients, helped secure supplies, and initially paid the association's rent herself. To continue volunteering her medical services to soldiers, she eventually pawned the gold watch her parents had given her for her 18th birthday.

When she resigned from the association, Walker was candid about the limits of continuing to donate her labor:

“I cannot afford to donate any more at present," she was known to have said. “My heart is still with the cause, but my energies must be in another direction.”

She wasn't stepping away from service. She was preparing to take it somewhere else: an official position as a surgeon with the US Army. 

In March 1864, Major General George H. Thomas directed her to report to the 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry near Gordon's Mills, Georgia. It still wasn't the military commission Walker had sought. But as a contract surgeon, she now had an official position—and would be paid for her medical work.

The work would take her to the front of the Federal lines—and far beyond them.

Beyond the Lines

At Gordon's Mills, Walker treated soldiers of the 52nd Ohio, but she soon found patients beyond the Federal lines. Fighting had left civilians in the surrounding countryside without reliable access to medical care, and Walker began traveling outside the lines to treat them.

At first, she went with armed escorts. But when a family several miles away pleaded for a physician for a sick child, Walker recalled telling her commanding officer:

“As they begged so hard for a physician, I stated to General McCook that I would go alone and relieve that distress.”

Walker understood the risk. When traveling with an escort, she carried two revolvers in her saddle. Alone, she made a deliberate calculation.

“I always removed the revolvers from my saddle,” she later wrote, explaining that she knew being captured with weapons could change how Confederate forces regarded her.

The trips became part of her work. Walker traveled from home to home treating civilians, many of whom had never encountered a woman physician. On one overnight visit, Walker recalled that a family refused to believe their doctor was a woman—“no woman could know as much as the doctor did”—and objected to someone they believed was a man remaining with their sick daughter through the night. She finally took down her long hair to convince them otherwise.

Each trip beyond Federal lines carried considerable risk, and Walker had several close calls. On one trip, she encountered a group of armed men whose leader confronted her and ordered her to drive her wagon into a secluded barn. She stalled, saying she needed to get to a patient, and they ultimately let her continue on her way. When Walker returned to headquarters and described the man to Colonel McCook and his officers, they suspected she had encountered Champ Ferguson, a notorious Confederate guerrilla who, they told her, had sworn to kill every Yankee who crossed his path.

Years later, Walker saw Ferguson's photograph and recognized the man she had encountered.

“I was so faint with the very thought of how narrowly I had escaped death … that I could hardly stand up.”

Still, Walker said the gratitude of the people she treated changed the way she regarded the danger:

“The people expressed so much gratitude … that I lost all fear of anything being done to myself.”

In April 1864, Walker's luck ran out.

A Prisoner—and Still a Doctor

In April 1864, Confederate soldiers captured Walker while she was returning toward Gordon's Mills. Her arrival drew attention almost immediately. Benedict J. Semmes, a Confederate captain who witnessed her arrival in Dalton, Georgia, recorded his reaction:

“We were all amused and disgusted too at the sight of a thing that nothing but the debased and depraved Yankee nation could produce—a female doctor. … [She was] fair, but not good looking, and of course had tongue enough for a regiment of men.”

That ridicule followed Walker during her transfer to Richmond, when one of her guards reportedly pretended to be ill, hoping she would misdiagnose him and give the men something else to laugh about. Walker refused to play along. 

Walker was eventually sent to Castle Thunder, a converted tobacco warehouse that held military and civilian prisoners, including women accused of offenses ranging from spying to prostitution. 

Walker offered to care for patients in the Castle Thunder hospital. Prison officials refused, despite the considerable need for medical care. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate food, and disease plagued prisons on both sides. More than 56,000 Federal and Confederate soldiers died in captivity during the war—roughly one in seven prisoners.

Walker experienced those conditions firsthand. In a letter home, however, she tried to reassure her parents, saying “I hope you are not grieving about me because I am a prisoner-of-war.”

She told them she had enough to eat, a clean bed, and kind officers. The reality was harsher. Food was scarce and sometimes spoiled. Her mattress was infested, opportunities for exercise were limited, and Walker sometimes leaned out of a small window for fresh air. By the time she left Castle Thunder, she had lost considerable weight and developed eye problems that would persist after her release.

On August 12, 1864, after approximately four months in Confederate custody, Walker was released in a prisoner exchange. Both sides desperately needed physicians; she was exchanged for a Confederate surgeon from Tennessee.

Walker returned physically weakened. She spoke with President Abraham Lincoln about her imprisonment and told a reporter she intended to settle her affairs and retire to private life.

By the time the story appeared in print, she had changed her mind.

Back to work

After her release, she again sought the military commission she had pursued throughout the war. The commission never came, but Walker continued her work for the Army.

In Louisville, Kentucky, she served as surgeon in charge of the hospital at the Female Military Prison. After spending four months as a prisoner of the Confederacy, Walker was now caring for Confederate women held by the Union. According to one of her hospital orderlies, she treated the prisoners with such attention that some on the Union side criticized her for it.

Walker later served at a refugee home in Tennessee. Major General George H. Thomas acknowledged that her services had “no doubt been valuable” and described her efforts as “earnest and untiring.” She ultimately received $432.36 in back pay for her work as a contract surgeon.

Formal recognition came another way.

On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson signed an order recognizing Walker’s wartime service, including her care for the sick and wounded, work as a contract surgeon, and her time as a prisoner of war. Because she had never been a commissioned officer, the order explained, she could not receive the brevet or honorary rank ordinarily used to recognize such service.

Instead, Johnson directed that “an honorable recognition of her services and sufferings” be made: Mary Edwards Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Continuing to Fight for Equality

The Medal did not stop Walker from challenging convention—or the conventional ways of opposing it.

After the war, Walker became an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, and her approach to equality was characteristically uncompromising. She rejected the idea that women needed to be granted rights they did not already possess, a position that sometimes put her at odds even with other leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. While many increasingly pursued a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the vote, Walker maintained that the Constitution already protected that right. The problem, in her view, was not that women needed to be given the vote. It was that they were being denied a right that was already theirs.

She approached clothing with much the same logic. Walker increasingly wore trousers and other less restrictive clothing that she considered more hygienic and practical. When critics described them as men’s clothes, she rejected the premise: “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”

More than 50 years after Walker received the Medal of Honor, her name was among hundreds removed from the Medal of Honor Roll following a review of earlier awards. Walker refused to surrender hers and continued wearing it until her death in 1919. In 1977, the Army restored her Medal of Honor.

Today, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker remains the only woman ever to receive the Medal. Her place in Medal of Honor history and the way she dressed have become two of the most recognizable parts of her legacy. But neither tells the full story.

“Mary Walker is often remembered for the way she dressed, but focusing too heavily on her clothing can overshadow the magnitude of what she actually did,” said Kali Schick, Senior Historian at the National Medal of Honor Museum. “She became a physician when few women could, fought for the opportunity to serve, practiced medicine in active war zones, and endured months as a prisoner of war. And then never stopped fighting to be recognized as an equal. Her clothing certainly is part of her story. It just isn’t the most remarkable part.”