Helen Walker McAndrew

Helen Walker McAndrew, was Washtenaw County's first woman physician. She was born in 1826, in Washtenaw County. No school in Michigan would admit McAndrew because she was a woman, and she traveled to New York to attend the New York Hydropathic and Hygienic Institute, where she received an M.D. When she returned to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she was ostracised for being a woman. She only began to be accepted into the community when she saved a prominent citizen's life, though all other physicians at the time had failed. She subsequently established a private practice with a Sanatorium in her house. McAndrew was a leader of the push to admit women into the medicine department ofUniversity of Michigan, which succeeded in 1870. She, working with her husband participated in the Underground Railroadand the suffrage movement, working with several prominent leaders of both movements, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She was posthumously named Ypsilanti's "Most Distinguished Business and Professional Woman".^[1]

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