Walker therefore remains not just the first woman to receive the medal but the only woman to have received it. The uniqueness that existed in 1865 still exists in 2026.
## The Falley Seminary and the Intellectual Formation
The specific educational institution where Walker received her secondary education — Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York, which she attended from 1850 to 1852 — is not a prominent institution in the history of American education, but it was a place where Walker spent two formative years before pursuing medical school.
The seminary prepared students for further study and for professional life, and Walker’s attendance there with two of her older sisters suggests a family that prioritized education for daughters across the generations, not just for a single unusual child. The Walker family’s commitment to education was systematic rather than exceptional for one member; the schoolhouse Alvah Walker built on his land, and the culture of learning he and Vesta Walker maintained, produced multiple daughters who pursued serious education.
The specific curriculum Walker encountered at Falley would have included the standard subjects of the period — grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy — with an emphasis on preparing students for the independent intellectual life that the seminary’s founders considered valuable. The skills Walker developed there — analytical thinking, persuasive writing, public argument — were the same skills she deployed in her post-war career as a writer and lecturer.
The path from Falley Seminary to Syracuse Medical College to the Patent Office Hospital to the Army of the Cumberland was not a path that the seminary’s founders had designed, but it was a path that the education they provided made possible. Walker was an unusually determined person; she was also a person who had received unusually good educational preparation for the work she did.