Helen Walker McAndrew

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 Cityto attend the Trall Institute (New York Hydropathic and Physiological School), where she earned her M.D. in 1855.[4]

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.[5][6]

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,[7] 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.

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.[8]

In 1931, McAndrew was posthumously named Ypsilanti's "Most Distinguished Business and Professional Woman."[9][10]