Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown was the first African American woman surgeon in the South, the first single woman in Tennessee to be granted the right to become an adoptive parent and the first African American woman to serve in the Tennessee state legislature.
American medical administrator, educator and clinician
In 2002, when she was given the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute Dr. Linda Lauberstein HIV Clinical Excellence Award, she was described as “an outstanding, compassionate HIV/AIDS practitioner… recognized among her colleagues as a consummate clinician and as a role model for setting standards of excellence in the provision of direct patient care.”
As a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa (Ojibwe) from Wahpeton, North Dakota, Angela M. Erdrich, M.D., brings her interest in American Indian art, history, and health care systems to her practice of pediatric medicine.
Sister Fernande Pelletier, M.D., a member of the Medical Mission Sisters has worked overseas for more than forty years, carrying out the mission of her order in Ghana and offering medical care to underserved populations.
Appointed chief of psychiatry at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital in 1946 and in 1961 she became one of only a few woman physicians appointed to a full professorship at Harvard Medical School at the time.
New Mexico obstetrician and gynecologist
Massachusetts’ first woman Commissioner of Public Health, as well as its youngest, where she established the US’s first Violence Prevention Office at a state health department.
Dr. Delores Leon became the first woman to become a flight surgeon in the United States Army and the first woman to serve as commander of the 545th General Dispensary, Camp Humphreys, Korea in 1975.
Dr. Christian-Christensen was the first woman delegate from the United States Virgin Islands and the first woman to represent an offshore Territory, as well as the first woman physician in the U.S. Congress.