This year we are honored not only one of most beloved pediatricians in New York City, but one of the world’s most important contributors to the science of gender-specific medicine. He is a rare combination of superb clinical expertise and ground-breaking scholarship. For over two decades he has worked with us to highlight the importance of understanding and acknowledging the differences between males and females, often pointing out that pediatrics was the first medical discipline to understand the importance of biological sex in determining how humans develop and function. In his foreword to the second edition of our textbook, Principles of Gender-specific Medicine, he wrote: Two year old children know their sex. A child that age doesn’t know much, but a boy knows he is a boy, a girl knows she is a girl. Young children don’t know exactly how or why boys and girls are different, but they know that they are. In that respect, they are exactly like medical scientists.
Dr. Marianne Legato, Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University is an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer, and specialist in gender-specific medicine. She is founding member of the International Society for Gender Medicine and also the founder and director of The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University and its next iteration, The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. These enterprises are the first collaborations between academic medicine and the private sector focused solely on gender-specific medicine: the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and of how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender and sex. Her ground breaking textbook on Gender-and Sex Specific Medicine has been published in 2017 in the 3rd edition.
She has published extensively on Gender and Sex Specific Medicine, both scientifically and for the lay public. She is also the founding editor of the journal Gender Medicine, and the Journal Gender and Genome, published for the scientific community. In 1992, Dr. Legato won the American Heart Association’s Blakeslee Award for the best book written for the lay public on cardiovascular disease. She is a practicing internist in New York City and has been listed each year in New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors” since the feature’s inception in 1993.
