While much of Dr. Quinn was fictional, some of the events and people were based on historical fact:
The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania actually existed and is today part of Drexel University College of Medicine.
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 was referred to in the pilot episode, though it was historically inaccurate as the pilot took place in 1867.
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, and Chief Black Kettle, are true historical figures.
The Battle of Washita River, seen in the third-season episode "Washita", was an actual historical event. In the show, the battle took place in 1869 in Colorado, while it took place in the fall of 1868 in Oklahoma.
People have often asked if Dr. Michaela Quinn was based on a historical person, such as Fraser, Colorado's "Doc Susie", Dr. Susan Anderson. In an interview in September 2013, the show's creator, Beth Sullivan, said that she knew nothing of real women doctors at that point in history. CBS asked her to create a family drama for the eight o'clock time slot and she asked if it could be a female lead in a period piece and they said yes. She said she had always been interested in the post-Civil War period and the rest came from her imagination, giving the character of Dr. Michaela Quinn her own world view.
In what most consider the final episode of the series, the town's often-antagonist banker, Preston A. Lodge III, went bankrupt as a result of the great stock market crash, caused by the Panic of 1873, a historically accurate event. Lodge lost much of the townspeople's money along with his own, in the Panic.
The episode "The Body Electric" features Walt Whitman, who was a poet and a true historical figure.
One of the major historical oversights of the show is that Colorado Springs was not technically founded until 1871, by General William Palmer, and was mainly a resort town. There were no saloons, as Palmer declared Colorado Springs to be alcohol-free. Colorado Springs stayed "dry" until the end of Prohibition in 1933. However, nearby towns, including Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs permitted saloons.
Starting in season 4, several episodes featured real-world trivia relevant to the episode's context, usually about medical knowledge. These segments appeared at the end of the episode in the form of white text on a black background, narrated by Jane Seymour. In the episode "A Place to Die", the inclusion of the trivia was particularly significant because it revealed that Dr. Mike's practice was besieged by a staph infection, a malady that was completely unknown at the time. No one, Dr. Mike included, actually figured out what was behind this mysterious blight, which killed several of her patients and forced her to fumigate the building and cremate everything inside, including some irreplaceable keepsakes.
