Medical education in the United States in the 1850s was not standardized in the way it would become by the end of the century. Some institutions were rigorous four-year programs with hospital training; others were shorter, less demanding, and operated more as credential-granting enterprises than as genuine medical schools. Syracuse Medical College, founded in 1849 by Dr. Stephen Potter, occupied a position somewhere in that spectrum — a legitimate institution, training students in the standard curriculum of the period, but not one of the elite schools that dominated the profession’s hierarchy.
The curriculum Walker studied would have included anatomy, physiology, materia medica (the predecessor to pharmacology), chemistry, surgery, and clinical observation. The practical component of her education was supplemented by her internship with a licensed physician and her work as a subscription agent for Potter’s journal, which gave her exposure to the medical literature of the period. By the time she graduated, she had a solid foundation in the medical knowledge available at mid-century.
What she did not have was the social infrastructure that most of her male classmates carried out of medical school: the network of professional colleagues who would refer patients, the institutional affiliations that conferred credibility, the assumption of competence that male physicians received by default. A woman physician in 1855 had to prove her competence in ways her male colleagues did not, and she had to do so against the active resistance of patients and other physicians who doubted not her specific preparation but the appropriateness of the category.