When Dr. Mary Walker applied to be a contract surgeon for the Union army in 1861, the Medical Department was stunned. no other women had dared suggest a thing. Thw surgeon general rejected her application until three years and a lot of hounding her later, when an Ohio regiment hired her as a contrace surgeon for six months. She then worked as an assistant surgeon until resigning in June 1865.

Mary adopted the uniform of her follow officers, a look General William Sherman found "damned unfeminine." But while attending the wounded on both sodes, she spied fot the Union. Confederates captured her as she treated a Rebel on a battlefield and sent her to a Southern prison for four months. Crowds gwaked as the female doctor was led throught Richmond. A Confederate captain wrote his wife that he and others were amused and disgusted by the "thing that nothing but thte debased and deprived Yankee nation could produce."

As an outspoken advocate for women's rights, Mary proudly wore feminine curls in her hair but continued wearing male clothing in civilian life and was often arrested. She opened a colony for women named Adamlesss Eden in 1897, but most women scorned her, her family shunned her, and the Board of Medals revoked her Medal of Honor six days before her death in February 1919. The award was officially reinstated in 1977.