One of the First Female Doctors in St. Louis

Dora Rochelle Schuyler (Skyler) was the second child of Matilda Rofheart & Benjamin Skyler, born in Vilna in 1877 she immigrated with her mother to St. Louis probably in 1882 at the age of five. Her father Ben had immigrated a few years earlier. According to early address-employment books, and birth certificates, Matilda worked from home as a midwife, so young Dora would have helped her Mom and developed her interest in Medicine.

While working as a stenographer, Dora was also one of the first women to attend Medical School in St. Louis, at the new Barnes Medical College. Graduating with her M.D. in 1910, Dora was the among the first twenty women to be licensed to practice Medicine in Missouri.

Difficulties women experienced in establishing a medical practice in the early 20th Century, led Dora to take a job as a Doctor with DuPont at Hadley's Bend, Tennessee, which was a city of 30,000 built in 1917 just to support the manufacture of smokeless powder for ammunition for World War I.

After the war Dora relocated her practice to Nashville till the late 1920s and moved back to St. Louis and practiced medicine until ill-health forced her to retire in the 1940s. She married once to A.J. Sharpe in 1925, they had no children and the marriage ended in divorce by 1940. She died January 20, 1960 in St. Louis, at age 82.