Daniela Lopez, graduating psychology major, viewing the Legacy Center’s new Health Sciences History Gallery on the second floor of the Health Sciences Building. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

A legacy institution now part of three Drexel University colleges and schools will be celebrated as part of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding: the first degree-granting medical school for women in the country (and the world).

As part of the city’s Semiquincentennial celebration, an ongoing “52 Weeks of Firsts” project highlights a different Philly innovation or invention each week of 2026. One of those “firsts” recognizes the first women’s medical college, which was founded as the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850, 74 years after America’s creation.

About 152 years and several mergers and name changes later, the institution partly formed Drexel’s College of Medicine, College of Nursing and Health Professions and Dana and David Dornsife School of Public Health in 2002. That means that Drexel has provided consistent opportunities for women to earn MDs longer than any other university in the world.

Known as the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) for most of its existence, the institution has a profound legacy of providing educational and professional opportunities to women in the medical field — especially when there were few options and resources to do so. Generations of medical professionals received degrees and training from WMCP, with many alumnae building professional careers to treat patients, advance the medical field, train fellow female physicians, and create care for women, children and those in underserved and underappreciated communities.

WMCP provided a foundation that continues to be built upon, centuries later. 2019 marked the first year in which more women students than men enrolled in medical school in the U.S (50.5% of students), which increased to a 54.6% majority as recently as 2023–2024. At Drexel, the College of Medicine’s Class of 2029 was 59% women.

WMCP’s cultural and institutional history has been maintained through the College of Medicine’s Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections, the repository for the records and heritage of Drexel’s health science programs and legacy schools. As part of the country’s 250^th anniversary, the Legacy Center is highlighting WMCP’s history and achievements by providing research materials, historical photos and artifacts, storytelling and other resources to a variety of external organizations, as well as different units and locations across Drexel.

“We were very excited to be considered given the impact on the evolution of women physicians, and being recognized underscores the importance of maintaining this history for Drexel, the city and the world,” said Legacy Center Director Margaret Graham. “This history is often overlooked, and this is an opportunity to continue building awareness.”

WMCP will be celebrated during Women’s History Month (and close to its March 11 founding date) with a “Firstival” on March 14. The event will feature a free community health fair and many opportunities to learn about WMCP: Historic Philadelphia’s Once Upon a Nation storytelling initiative will present a story about one of WMCP’s first graduates, for example. The Legacy Center will unveil a new history gallery sharing the history of the University’s health sciences programs, which will complement its other exhibits in the Health Sciences Building highlighting the legacy of WMCP.

The original location of both the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania was in a since-demolished building at 627 Arch St. in Philadelphia. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

The First

Other “52 Firsts” include the country’s first university (University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1740); the first hospital (Pennsylvania Hospital, now part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, founded in 1751); and the first medical school (today's Perelman School of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, opened in 1765).

WMCP opened 85 years after the first medical school, in 1850. (In 1880, WMCP alumna Mary Alice Bennett, MD 1876, became the first woman to earn a degree at the University of Pennsylvania: a doctor of philosophy degree for her post-graduate course in medical science.)

WMCP was started by male Quaker businessmen involved in 19th-century social justice movements. The idea for the school came from Bartholomew Fussell, MD (1794–1871), a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. William J. Mullen (1805­–1882), a successful jeweler trained in dentistry and a prominent reformer, served as the institution’s first president. Joseph S. Longshore, MD (1809–1879), a graduate of that first medical school in America, became secretary and one of the six male founding faculty members. 

The college opened at a time when education, and especially professional education, was limited for women. It was only within the past decade that a woman, Catherine Brewer, became the first to earn a bachelor’s degree (from Wesleyan College in 1840) and that a woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, became the first to earn a medical degree (from Geneva Medical School in 1849). In 1848, the New England Female Medical College opened as the first medical school to train women (it didn’t offer medical degrees until after WMCP).

“In teaching with collections with various groups, like Drexel students and high school students, we’re often looking at issues that reflect the nation’s founding: liberty, equality and justice for all. We consider that women making their way in medicine was a revolution in itself,” said Graham.

This 1851 photograph of Hannah E. Myers Longshore, MD, was taken the same year she graduated from WMCP as part of its first graduating class. She’s accompanied by her daughter, Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg, who became a noted suffragist and First Lady of Philadelphia (and is named for abolitionist and suffragist Lucretia Mott, who was good friends with Hannah). The two of them, with Hannah’s sister Jane V. Myers, MD, who graduated in 1854 from the Penn Medical College, were recently recognized with a Pennsylvania Historical Marker outside of their home in Bala Cynwyd. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

The Firsts That Followed

Longshore’s sister Anna Longshore-Potts, MD, and sister-in-law Hannah E. Myers Longshore, MD, were two of the eight members of WMCP’s first graduating class in 1851 — which is to say, the world’s first all-women graduating class of MDs.

Longshore-Potts practiced in Michigan before becoming an author and advocate for women in medicine, traveling across the country and around the world to give lectures. Myers Longshore returned to her alma mater as a “demonstrator of anatomy” — the first female faculty member at a U.S. medical college — and became the first woman doctor to go into private practice in Philadelphia (her story, including her response to a shopkeeper refusing to sell her medicine for her patients, will be shared at the March 14 Firstival).

Ann Preston, MD, was in that inaugural class; she took a post-graduate study and taught at WMCP before becoming the first woman dean of WMCP — and any medical college in the world — in 1866. 

Students chose WMCP to earn an education that would not have been available to them in their town, county, state or country. Many returned to those places to open their own practices and clinics, often becoming the first or a first female doctor in the area.

Some of those trailblazers include:

• Rebecca Cole, MD 1867, the first Black WMCP graduate as well as the first Black woman MD in Philadelphia and second in the country
• Charlotte Yhlen, MD 1873, the first Swedish women to graduate from a medical school and the first female physician to practice in the country
• Jennie Kidd Trout, MD 1875, the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Canada
• Kei Okami, MD 1889, the first Japanese woman with a degree in Western medicine
• Susan La Flesche Picotte, MD 1889, the first Native American to earn an MD
• Sabat M. Islambouli, MD 1890, the first Syrian woman with a Western medical degree
• Honoria Acosta-Sison, MD 1909, the first Filipina woman medical doctor. She had originally attended Drexel (then known as the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry) from 1904 to 1905 as part of its Junior Domestic Science and Arts program.

An undated photograph of Ann Preston, MD, a member of WMCP’s first graduating class and America’s first woman medical dean. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

Female “firsts” often came with negative reactions to changes in the status quo, and WMCP students and alumna faced significant sexist treatment and barriers.

Early generations of students were barred from attending clinics and joining medical societies, and it sometimes didn’t get easier even when they received access. A famous, and infamous, "Jeering Episode" incident gained national attention in 1869 when WMCP students were harassed and abused (both verbally and with spitballs) by male medical students at a clinical lecture at Pennsylvania Hospital (that “first” hospital founded in 1751).

These WMCP medical professionals continued working and paying it forward, which is why so many created their own opportunities in the field and within their own practices. They helped fill the lack of established or funded opportunities, research and training in then-undervalued fields such as nursing, obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics and certain cancers affecting women. Because of this, many alumna became "firsts" for their accomplishments related to professional occupations, leadership positions and establishments they openedm, among many other examples.

“There is so much to learn from this history, and from so many of these alumnae, about science, tenacity, equality, social justice and health care equity and inequities,” said Graham, the Legacy Center director.

Some of those professional accomplishments:

• Before becoming the first woman dean, Preston created partnerships with other area hospitals so WMCP students could gain clinical experience, and later opened the WMCP Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia in 1861, which was funded by an all-women board of governors she created. At WMCP, Preston helped open the country’s first state-chartered school for nurses.
• Catherine Macfarlane, MD 1899, established the first uterine cancer screenings in Philadelphia, and one of the first in the country, in the 1930s. She became the first woman fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1932 (male fellows joined upon its 1787 founding) and taught at WMCP for decades.
• Alma Morani, MD 1931, became the country’s first woman plastic surgeon and established Philadelphia’s first clinic for hand surgery in 1948.

This photograph of WMCP students attending a clinical lecture in a surgical ampitheatre originally appeared in the 1916-17 Annual Announcement of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

The Last

WMCP wasn’t just the world’s first medical school to grant MD degrees to women — it also lasted over 50 years as the only single-sex medical school for women in the country. In 1970, it started accepting men and became Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP).

Allegheny Health System acquired MCP in 1998 and Hahnemann University in 1993 (plus affiliate hospitals) to form MCP Hahnemann University School of Medicine, the largest private medical school in the country. Hahnemann University had opened in 1848 — in the same building as WMCP, located at 627 Arch St. — as the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania, providing training in homeopathy. The institution’s homeopathy focus started waning in the 1930s and was eliminated entirely by 1959. It admitted its first female students in 1941. 

This new academic entity underwent another merger and name change before Drexel assumed management of it, ultimately creating the College of Medicine, College of Nursing and Health Professions and Dornsife School of Public Health in 2002.

A historic, and famous, 1885 photograph of three trailblazing WMCP students who were among the first women in their respective home countries to earn a degree in Western medicine: Anandibai Joshee, MD 1886, from India; Kei Okami, MD 1889, from Japan; and Sabat Islambooly, MD 1890, from Syria. Photo courtesy Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections.

America Celebrates the Firsts

This is the first national anniversary in which WMCP will be celebrated as part of Drexel.

At the 1876 Centennial Exposition, more than 200 buildings were constructed in the new Fairmount Park to showcase exhibits of American history and ingenuity — including a “Women’s Building” funded by the Women’s Centennial Committee that showed accomplishments and inventions related to women and the female experience. WMCP received $500 (worth more than $15,000 today) to create an exhibit called “Materia medica,” which featured more than 150 specimens related to the historical and eponymous field related to therapeutic properties of healing substances. Clara Marshall, MD 1875, who had been appointed professor of materia medica and therapeutics at WMCP in 1876, supervised the exhibit; 10 years later, she became dean of WMCP, a position she held for 31 years. 

The 150th anniversary ­(the Sesquicentennial International Exposition) in 1926 also featured a WMCP exhibit — this time, in a special Educational Building created for the big celebration. The exhibit featured a large map pinned with all the places where alumnae practiced medicine; photographs of the students, faculty and alumni working at their practice or in WMCP’s hospital and maternity care ward; and relics related to WMCP, including the key to its first building. 

WMCP was included as a “first” in the 1976 Bicentennial programming, similar to this year, but it was more prominently featured during the national anniversaries when it was still a medical college for women.

Now, for the 250th anniversary, WMCP is not the only “52 Weeks of Firsts” recognition related to Drexel. The first scientific society of natural history (from 1812), which is today’s the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, will be celebrated Aug. 1. Stay tuned for more details!