Eleanor Josephine Macdonald

Eleanor Josephine Macdonald

Eleanor Josephine Macdonald (born March 4, 1906 in Somerville (Massachusetts) , † July 27, 2007 ) was Professor of Epidemiology at MD Anderson Hospital at the University of Texas in Houston from 1948 to 1974 . She is considered to be "the architect of the world's first cancer registry, " which she built between 1940 and 1948 in Hartford, Connecticut . Her professorship was the world's first for the epidemiology of cancer , and she was the first to demonstrate that there is a connection between solar radiation and malignant melanoma .

education

Eleanor Macdonald was the third of six children of Angus Alexander Macdonald - an engineer of Scottish descent - and his wife, Catharine Boland Macdonald, a concert pianist of Anglo-Irish descent. She studied music, literary history and English at Radcliffe College until 1928 and then worked as a full-time cellist for two years . A doctor friend of her father's then asked her for help in writing a scientific publication, which aroused her interest in epidemiology.

career

Eleanor Macdonald applied for a position at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in 1930 , where the world's first study on the incidence of cancer in people over 40 had just started. For five years, she and her helpers wandered door-to-door in Massachusetts, visiting private households to ask about chronic illnesses of their residents. The result of these surveys is now considered to be the world's first population-based study on cancer incidence. The world's first awareness campaigns for the early detection of cancer emerged from it in Massachusetts.

From 1940 to 1948 Macdonald worked for the State Health Department of Connecticut , where she and a helper visited all hospitals in this US state, viewed all available medical records of cancer patients and tracked their survival time. This research resulted in the world's first epidemiological cancer registry (based on the population of a region) , and the first aftercare programs in the field of oncology developed from this . During this time, she - the autodidact in the field of statistics - also spent her weekends building and managing a department for medical statistics at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center .

In 1948 Eleanor Macdonald was appointed professor of cancer epidemiology to Texas , where she worked for the next 45 years at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. In El Paso (Texas) she founded another epidemiological cancer registry, the data of which goes back to 1944. One of his findings was showing that Hispanics are less likely to develop cancer than white US citizens and that there is a relationship between sunlight and skin cancer that may develop. a. it shows that residents of regions close to the equator are more likely to develop skin cancer than residents of northern and southern regions. Based on their data collection, the world's first attempts were made to treat leukemia patients with chemotherapy.

Honors

Eleanor Macdonald was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Public Health Association as well as - since 1946 - the American Association for Cancer Research .

literature

• Marilyn Ogilvie, Joy Harvey (Eds.): The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century. Vol. 2: LZ. Routledge, New York 2000, p. 819

Individual evidence

1. ↑ quoted from an obituary in: mdi 9, issue 3, September 2007, p. 138 (published by the professional association of medical IT specialists , ISSN  1438-0900 )
2. ↑ Biography: Eleanor Josephine Macdonald. ( Memento from November 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive )