Ann Preston

Ann Preston (1813 to 1872) was an American physician, educator and reformer who became the first woman to serve as dean of a medical school in the United States. Born into a Quaker farming family in West Grove, Pennsylvania, she taught school, lectured women on hygiene and physiology, and trained as an apprentice to a physician before entering the first class of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1851. She became professor of physiology and hygiene there in 1853, led the effort in 1862 to found the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia so that students could gain clinical training, and was dean of the college, by then called the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, from 1866 until 1872. She also opened a school of nursing and campaigned to admit women students to clinical lectures at Philadelphia hospitals despite open hostility from male students, while keeping her own practice at the Woman's Hospital.