WWAMI Scrapbook
Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho Medical Program Scrapbook
About the Collection
By Brian Tibayan, 2024 Strong Fellow
The WWAMI program is a partnership between the University of Washington School of Medicine and the five states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho (WWAMI) to provide accessible medical education addressing the need for physicians in the region, particularly in rural areas. This collection presents a scrapbook of photos, correspondence, and clippings documenting WWAMI’s early years from 1971 to 1975 at University of Idaho, found in the WWAMI records collection held at Special Collections and Archives.
Through photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, press releases, and memos, the WWAMI scrapbook documents the history of the medical education program, highlighting its development, implementation, and significant impact from 1971 to 1975. The collection underscores key milestones, student experiences, field trips, clinical rotations, and the contributions of faculty and community partners.
The content vividly portrays the program’s efforts to address rural healthcare shortages, enhance medical training, and foster inter-institutional collaboration. Furthermore, the collection delves into the planning and approval processes, educational curriculum, influence on rural healthcare, community and institutional support, and addresses challenges, criticisms, cultural interactions, diversity, achievements, personal stories, and financial and administrative aspects.
This rich historical perspective helps illustrate the program’s transformative role in regional medical education.
The view the entire scrapbook as a single PDF, visit the complete scrapbook page.
Please Note: the program was called “WAMI” until 1996 when Wyoming joined adding the second “W” to the acronym.
More detailed information about the full collection and its contents can be found in the WWAMI records finding aid.
Processing of this collection was made possible through the Gary E. and Carolyn J. Strong Special Collections Fellowship.
Additional Links
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.