Medical career In Ypsilanti, McAndrew practiced as a self-trained nurse. When her son was still an infant, she decided to pursue medicine. No medical school west of New York would admit female students, so she traveled to
New York City to attend the
Trall Institute (New York Hydropathic and Physiological School), where she earned her
M.D. in 1855. When McAndrew returned to Ypsilanti, she was ostracized by the public she had previously nursed. She turned to practicing medicine for the marginalized poor and
African Americans in her community. She was not accepted as a doctor by most members of her community until she saved the life of local State Senator Samuel Post's long-suffering wife, helping her where distinguished physicians from
Ann Arbor failed. As a proponent of the
water cure, she subsequently established a private practice with a
sanatorium in her home and
mineral baths in the nearby
Huron River. By numerous accounts, McAndrew was the first female licensed physician in the state of Michigan.
Activism McAndrew was a leader of the push to admit women into the department of medicine at the
University of Michigan, which succeeded in 1870. She, along with her husband, participated in the
Underground Railroad,
temperance societies and the
suffrage movement in Washtenaw County. She worked with several prominent leaders on the suffrage movement including
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony.
Later life and death McAndrew was widowed after the death of her husband on October 22, 1895. She died eleven years later on October 26, 1906, in
Ypsilanti, Michigan. In 1931, McAndrew was posthumously named Ypsilanti's "Most Distinguished Business and Professional Woman." She was inducted into the
Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1994. ==References==