Ann Preston (December 1, 1813 – April 18, 1872) was an American physician, activist, and educator. As head of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, she was the first female dean of a medical school in the United States of America.
The Chester County Quaker community, in which she raised “was ardently abolitionist and pro-temperance, and the Preston family farm, Prestonville, was known as safe harbor for escaped slaves as part of the Underground Railroad.”
By the 1840s, Preston became interested in educating women about their bodies and taught all-female classes on hygiene and physiology.[4] She was privately educated in medicine as an apprentice to Dr. Nathaniel Moseley from 1847 to 1849. Unable to attend other medical schools because of their policies against admitting women, Preston entered the Quaker-founded Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (later changed to Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867) at the age of 38 as a student in its inaugural class of 1850.
In later years as dean of a medical school, her position allowed her to champion the right of women to become physicians, and she campaigned for her female students to be admitted to clinical lectures at the Blockley Philadelphia Hospital, and the Pennsylvania Hospital, despite the open hostility of some male medical students and faculty.