Obituary — Marguerite Shearer, M.D.

Marguerite “Peg” Shearer (M.D. 1960) died February 6, 2024, at age 91. She put herself through medical school at U-M, where she was one of eight women in her class.

As a physician at the U-M Student Health Service, she was the first to prescribe contraceptives to students. Alarmed by some of the stories related to her by students who had undergone illegal abortions, she and her husband, Marshall Shearer, M.D. (Residency 1964) volunteered to give sex education lectures, which became incredibly popular at U-M.  

The Shearers wrote a weekly article on sex for the Detroit Free Press that became nationally syndicated, and they published three books on sex and relationships.

Shearer was a rural family physician who was a leader in family medicine at U-M. She helped select and recruit the department’s first chair in 1978 and established the AEI Sorority Endowed Medical Student Scholarship Fund in the Department of Family Medicine to support medical students who choose family medicine as their specialty.

This obituary is based on U-M sources and an obituary published in the Ann Arbor News.