Ann Preston, Pioneer Physician

Ann Preston was born in West Grove in eighteen thirteen and grew up in a Quaker household where abolition and women's rights were treated as moral facts. She graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania helped found the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, and in eighteen sixty-six became dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first woman to serve as dean of a medical school in the United States.

At the hospital she established one of the earliest nurses' training schools in the country. She fought throughout her career for women's access to the medical profession at a time when most hospitals refused to grant clinical training to female students. Preston combined her professional ambitions with Underground Railroad activity near her family's home in Chester County. She died in eighteen seventy-two, having reshaped what American medicine owed to women both as practitioners and as patients.