The fifth pioneer was Ann Preston, a Quaker lady of Philadelphia, an ardent abolitionist, as it was the inherited privilege of the Friends to be.[63] Miss Preston had become early habituated to interest herself in the cause of minorities. Small and fragile in body, she possessed an indomitable little soul; and when the suggestion had once been thrown out, that a medical college for women might be opened in Philadelphia, Ann Preston never ceased working until had been collected the meagre funds considered sufficient for its establishment. This was in 1850; and the sixth annual announcement of the school mentions Dr. Preston as already installed as professor of physiology. This position she held till the day of her death. At the outset, the new medical school was scarcely an improvement upon its Boston predecessor. Four months lectures,—composed of compilations from three or four text-books,—the same repeated the following year, constituted the curriculum. There was much zeal, but little knowledge. Dr. Preston herself, philanthropist and excellent woman as she was, was necessarily ignorant of her subject, because she had never had any opportunity to learn anything about it. The other professors were not more qualified, although without the same excuse of necessity. Ten years after the opening of the college, the Philadelphia County Medical Society found an apparently plausible pretext for refusing recognition to the school, in the fact that the lecturer on therapeutics was not a physician but a druggist,—who moreover presumed to practice medicine over his counter, and “irregular” and advertised medicine at that. Even more to the purpose than these accumulated crimes was the fact that his lectures consisted almost exclusively of strings of prescriptions, and had no real claim to be accepted as exponents of the modern science of therapeutics.