Madge Maclin's Research Into Medical Education Summary
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Macklin, nonetheless, is important for her efforts to introduce genetics instruction into medical education.3 In 1932 she corresponded with several deans of medical schools in Canada, the United States, and Britain, inquiring about the amount of instruction they were providing on heredity and disease.
She presented her findings at the Third International Eugenics Congress held in New York during August 1932 as part of a proposal that a standardized course in medical genetics be established during the last year of medical school. Macklin went on to prepare a sample syllabus for such a course in 1933. She proposed thirty-six hours of instruction, including two hours devoted to the basic principles of Mendelian genetics, one hour of methodology for compiling family histories, and one hour of “preventive and public health aspects of the problem.”
Advocate of medical genetics, a term she coined, and a pioneer researcher in the inheritance of…show more content… Impatient with research that did not use proper controls, she analyzed data she had carefully gathered from family histories and studies of twins. Her major research interest was the hereditary aspects of cancer, and her studies provided convincing evidence that hereditary factors, along with environmental ones, were involved in many specific types of cancer (such as gastric cancer and breast cancer).
Madge Macklin's human genetics studies, like the animal experiments of MAUD SLYE, helped call the attention of the medical profession to the genetic aspects of cancer. She stressed the therapeutic utility of such information, which would alert the physician to be on the watch for early signs of tumors in patients with a family history of cancer. Macklin also investigated other topics in medical genetics, as evidenced, for example, by her monograph on hereditary abnormalities of the