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Mary Edwards Walker: The Surgeon They Could Not Commission, and the Medal She Would Not Give Back

Mary Edwards Walker did the work before she was ever given the title. Denied a commission because she was a woman, she served anyway — in hospitals, at the front, and in a Confederate prison — and in 1865 she received the Medal of Honor, the only woman who ever has. In 1917 the Army took her name off the Roll. She refused to return the medal and wore it every day for the rest of her life. This page is the documented record of what she did, what her institution did afterward, and who carried her case after she was gone.

The service and the promise

Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego County, New York. The Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum records that her parents raised their children with gender and racial equality in mind, opened the first free school in Oswego, sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, and encouraged their daughters to pursue higher education and professional careers. Walker took that upbringing at its word. In 1855 she graduated from Syracuse Medical College — making her, by the Smithsonian’s account, only the second female doctor in American history, six years after Elizabeth Blackwell. She married a fellow medical student, Albert Miller, and they set up a joint practice in Rome, New York. She refused to agree to “obey” him in her wedding vows, kept her own name, and wore a short skirt with trousers at the ceremony. By 1859, the Smithsonian records, both the practice and the marriage had failed.

When the Civil War began, Walker went to Washington intending to join the Army as a surgeon, expecting that the need for trained medical professionals would outweigh the reluctance to accept a woman. It did not. Her request for a commission was denied. So she began where she was allowed: volunteering as an assistant surgeon at a makeshift hospital in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. She helped establish a relief organization for the female family members who came to visit wounded loved ones, and she faced, in the Smithsonian’s words, open hostility for refusing to conform — while earning respect for the treatment she gave to soldiers and civilians alike.

The promise at stake in her case was stated in her own citation, and it is a narrow one. The Army would not commission her, because no law or precedent allowed it to commission a woman. What it could do — what President Andrew Johnson concluded it should do — was recognize the service it had already accepted from her. Walker kept her side of that bargain in full, in the field and in prison, at the cost of her health. The question this page follows is what the institution did with its side: first in 1865, then in 1917, and then, sixty years after she died, in 1977.

What happened

By the end of 1862, Walker was working as a Union field surgeon near the front lines, though still as a non-commissioned volunteer, including during the fighting at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and at Chattanooga, Tennessee, after the Battle of Chickamauga. She kept petitioning for a commission, appealing directly to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and to President Abraham Lincoln. The closest she ever came to a formal enlistment, the Smithsonian records, was appointment as “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” — the rank and organization carried on the Army’s official citation — attached to the 52nd Ohio Infantry in the Army of the Cumberland. She was, by the National Park Service’s account, the first woman to serve as a contract surgeon in the U.S. Army.

She frequently crossed enemy lines to treat civilians who needed medical care. On April 10, 1864, she was captured by Confederate forces and sent to Castle Thunder, the military prison in Richmond, Virginia, where she was held as a prisoner of war. The Park Service and the Smithsonian both describe what those four months cost her: the prison held an estimated 700 to 1,000 prisoners when she arrived, its guards had been investigated by the Confederate House of Representatives for excessive brutality, and Walker suffered severe weight loss, bronchitis, and a permanent loss of eyesight that contributed to her leaving medical practice shortly after the war. Her official citation puts the fact more plainly: she “endured hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon.”

On August 12, 1864, Walker was released in a prisoner exchange for a Confederate surgeon. She treated the exchange — a surgeon for a surgeon — as validation of her standing, and she went back to work. The citation records that she was assigned to duty and served as an assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners at Louisville, Kentucky, upon the recommendation of Major Generals William T. Sherman and George H. Thomas.

On November 11, 1865, President Johnson ordered the Medal of Honor given to her. The official citation, as carried by the Army’s AMEDD Center of History and Heritage and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, is a service citation, and its own words define what was being honored:

That last point matters, and this page will not blur it. The medal was given precisely because the ordinary route — a commission or brevet — was closed to her. It was not, in its own text, an award for a single act of combat gallantry. It was the institution’s chosen substitute for the rank it would not grant. She was also accused at the time of her capture of being a spy; the Army’s own later profile notes that claims she had been captured intentionally in order to spy have little evidence to support them, and no finding on that question is part of the official award record. What is in the award record is the service above, attested by Sherman and Thomas and signed by the President.

What the institution did afterward

Walker wore the medal for the rest of her life, through a second career as a writer and lecturer for women’s suffrage, dress reform, and the rights of wartime nurses. She attempted to vote in the 1871 election and was turned away. She argued that no new amendment was needed because the Constitution already granted women the vote and needed only to be enforced — a position that eventually parted her from the organized suffrage movement, as the Smithsonian records. She was arrested more than once over the clothes she wore, and her answer, as quoted by the Smithsonian, was: “I don’t wear men’s clothes. I wear my own clothes.”

Then the standard changed. Revised standards for the Medal of Honor were issued in 1916, requiring, in the formulation quoted in the Kentucky National Guard’s account, only “actual combat with an enemy.” A review of Army Medal of Honor awards followed in 1916–1917. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society records the ground on which Walker’s award was rescinded: she was a civilian at the time of her service. The Army’s AMEDD Center states the result on the face of her citation: “(Medal rescinded 1917 along with 910 others, restored by President Carter 10 June 1977.)” In total, 911 awards were struck — Walker’s and 910 others. Her citation, which omitted any mention of active combat service, did not meet the new test, and the Smithsonian notes that same omission in its account of why she and the 910 others were disqualified.

Walker refused to return the medal. That refusal is not a later embellishment; it is carried by the Army itself, by the Smithsonian, and by the National Park Service’s fellow accounts of her life. She wore it, in the Smithsonian’s words, “proudly wearing it on her chest every day for the remaining two years of her life.” She died in Oswego, New York, on February 21, 1919, at 86 — still, in her own keeping, a Medal of Honor recipient, and no longer, in the Army’s, one at all.

Why was her name struck? Here this page has to be exact, because the record is exact about what it contains. The documented reason given by the review was eligibility: a new combat standard, applied retroactively, and a civilian status that had been stated on the face of her award from the day it was signed. Some later writers have believed her sex, or her suffrage activism, was the real reason she was targeted. Those beliefs are recorded here as attribution, not as a finding. The 1917 board struck 910 other awards alongside hers, most of them held by men, and no official inquiry has ever found that the board singled Walker out because she was a woman. What the record does contain — and it is the more telling document — is what the Army said when it reversed itself in 1977, quoted below. The institution that restored her chose, itself, to name discrimination in its reasons. The board that removed her never did.

The case survived because her family would not let it close. The Smithsonian records that the restoration came “after years of work by her descendants.” Accounts of that campaign name her great-grandniece Ann Walker as the descendant who campaigned for years to have the medal restored — a campaign a contemporary account in American Heritage in December 1977 described as succeeding on the ground that the earlier decision had been unjust. Walker herself had carried the first half of the case, by wearing the medal in defiance for two years. Her descendants carried the second half, for sixty.

Where it stands now

On June 10, 1977, Walker’s Medal of Honor was restored. The AMEDD Center carries the date and the authority on the face of her citation: restored by President Jimmy Carter on 10 June 1977. The National Archives records that the restoration was made at the behest of the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, and contemporary reporting records Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander acting on that board’s recommendation, which suggested the 1917 board may have erred.

The restoration language is the center of this record, and it is quoted here as it is carried in the Kentucky National Guard’s official account and repeated in the Army Board’s findings as reported at the time. The board praised her:

“distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex.”

Read that sentence carefully. The 1977 board did not merely find a paperwork error. It found gallantry, self-sacrifice, and unflinching loyalty, and it placed alongside them a judgment about how she had been treated: apparent discrimination because of her sex. That wording is the institution’s own — not a historian’s, not this page’s. It is also, in its caution, an institutional wording: “apparent” is not a finding of liability, and this page reports it as the board stated it, no stronger and no weaker.

Walker did not live to hear it. She had been dead for 58 years. Unlike Paris Davis, elsewhere in this section, who stood in the East Room and heard his own citation read, Walker received her vindication the way she had received her captivity and her removal: in absentia, on paper, after the fact. The medal account, however, is closed in a way Davis’s explanation never was. The Army did not only restore the medal; in the same action it left, on the record, a reason that names what had been done to her.

The honors that followed are part of the standing record. The medal presented in 1977 is held in the Pentagon Women’s Corridor, and her original medal is held by the Richardson-Bates House Museum in Oswego, according to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. In 1982 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor. In 2024, the U.S. Mint issued a quarter in her name in the American Women Quarters Program; the Mint’s design shows her holding her pocket surgical kit, wearing the Medal of Honor she refused to give back, with the medal’s details beside her. Nearly 160 years after President Johnson signed her citation, she remains what AMEDD states without qualification: “Dr. Mary E. Walker is the only female recipient of the Medal of Honor to date.”

The ledger

Walker is this section’s “restored after death — and still alone on the Roll” exhibit: the medal taken, refused, and finally restored with the discrimination named, and no second woman ever added beside her. Her fight for the medal is finished. Its singularity is not an open campaign; it is a fact that has now stood for more than a century and a half.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera recorded the Patent Office Hospital, the field hospitals, or Castle Thunder — Walker survives in a citation, in photographs, and in the paper record she and her family defended. What the record has instead is a new documentary built around her papers and her hometown museum, the Defense Department’s own one-minute portrait, and historians telling the whole arc, removal and restoration included. Five films:

The documentary. A short documentary on Walker as reformer, Civil War surgeon, and suffragist — the service, the capture, and the refusal to compromise. (The Mary Walker Film; official selection, Hamilton New York International Film Festival.)

The Defense Department's portrait. The Department of Defense's Medal of Honor Monday feature on Walker — the one-minute official telling of the only woman on the Roll. (U.S. Department of Defense video.)

Surgeon and activist. Wounded Warrior Project's short feature on Walker's early years, her Civil War service, and the activism that defined the rest of her life. (Wounded Warrior Project video.)

The full biography. Biographics' life of Walker — medicine, war, prison, suffrage, and the medal she would not return. (Biographics video.)

The quarter, and the legacy. The National Women's History Museum's full 2024 program for the U.S. Mint quarter honoring Walker, with the Mint, the City of Oswego, her family, and the town historian. (National Women's History Museum video.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.