Dolores Mercedes Piñero was one of the first female doctors in Puerto Rico and the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a doctor under contract with the United States Army. During World War II, Piñero helped establish a hospital in Puerto Rico to attend soldiers who had contracted the swine flu. Dolores Mercedes Piñero was born in San Juan in 1892, at a time when the island was still a Spanish colony. Piñero was educated in Puerto Rico until Puerto Rico came under the control of the United States, under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the Spanish-American War. Her parents sent her to live in Boston, where she continued her education. Piñero completed her medical degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston in 1913. She became one of the first four women from Puerto Rico to earn a medical degree. After earing her degree, Piñero returned to Puerto Rico and set up a practice in the town of Rio Piedras which included anesthesia as a specialty. Though Dr. Piñero applied to the Army in 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship, she was rejected. After writing a letter to the Army Surgeon General explaining her intentions, she was quickly accepted. The Army had realized that they were in need of anesthesiologists. She was assigned to the Army General Hospital of Fort Brooke in San Juan, where she worked as an anesthesiologist in the morning and in the laboratory during the afternoons. As influenza, also known as “swine flu”, began to affect soldiers, Dr. Piñero was one of five doctors assigned to open a 400-bed hospital in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The swine flu infected one quarter of all soldiers and killing more than 55,000 American troops. After the flu epidemic ended, she was reassigned to the Army base hospital. When her contract with the Army ended at the close of World War II, she returned to her private practice. Piñero married and had two children. She was the first Puerto Rican woman to be named to the Puerto Rico Department of Health. Dolores Mercedes Piñero died in 1975.

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