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Several pictures of doctors who are featured on the Local Legends web site

LOCAL LEGENDS: About Us

Local Legends is a partnership of the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), the NIH Office of Women’s Health Research (OWHR), and the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA). On behalf of the partners, the AMWA annually calls upon the Congress to nominate outstanding women physicians from their state or district who have demonstrated commitment, originality, innovation, or creativity in her field of medicine. Local Legends is a companion gallery to NLM’s Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians exhibition on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. The gallery spotlights these women physicians – their lives, their achievements, their dreams, and the challenges they faced in becoming physicians. The exhibition, including the Local Legends gallery web site, will travel to cities across the country beginning in spring, 2005. In February 2004, those women physicians nominated by their Congressional representative to be Local Legends were announced at the American Medical Women’s Association annual conference in San Diego, CA. These women are profiled in this web site. The AMWA has continued the Local Legends project providing the Congress with the opportunity to again nominate and recognize outstanding women physicians from their district or state to be featured in the exhibition since it began to travel throughout the United States in spring, 2005.

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE (NLM)

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects materials in all areas of biomedicine and health care, as well as works on biomedical aspects of technology, the humanities, and the physical, life, and social sciences. The collections stand at more than 7 million items--books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs and images. Housed within the Library is one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. The Library's collection may be consulted in the reading room or requested on interlibrary loan. NLM is a national resource for all U.S. health science libraries through a National Network of Libraries of Medicine®

THE OFFICE OF RESEARCH ON WOMEN'S HEALTH (ORWH)

The Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) serves as a focal point for women's health research at the NIH. The ORWH promotes, stimulates, and supports efforts to improve the health of women through biomedical and behavioral research on the roles of sex (biological characteristics of being female or male) and gender (social influences based on sex) in health and disease. ORWH works in partnership with the NIH institutes and centers to ensure that women's health research is part of the scientific framework at NIH and throughout the scientific community.

THE AMERICAN MEDICAL WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION (AMWA)

The American Medical Women's Association (AMWA) is the only national medical association dedicated to women physicians, residents and medical students. Representing women of all specialties, AMWA has been supporting women in medicine for almost 90 years. Dedicated to advancing women in medicine and improving women's health, AMWA has educated physicians and the public on a number of women's health issues including smoking prevention and cessation, osteoporosis, violence against women, heart disease, gender equity, breast cancer, and reproductive health. AMWA has also worked for gender equity in the medical professional.
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