Madge Macklin

After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Madge taught one semester at University of Pittsburgh Medical School as an instructor of gross anatomy.[4] Then, she was briefly an assistant in physiology at Johns Hopkins University from 1919 to 1921.[5] Later in 1921, Madge, Charles, and their two daughters moved to Canada, and Madge became a part-time instructor of histology and embryology at the University of Western Ontario. She remained in this position until 1930 when she became a part-time assistant professor.[5] Both Madge and Charles worked at the University of Western Ontario, Charles as a professor and Madge only in her part-time positions. She was placed in these part-time positions despite her being regarded as a pioneer of the genetics movement. While she was working there, she also researched medical genetics despite being underpaid and not being promoted to full-time professor.[4]

During her time at the University of Western Ontario, while she was studying medical genetics, Madge Macklin advocated for introducing medical genetics into medical curriculum. She wanted genetics to be taught in terms of medical diseases not just in terms of genetic expression and insisted that it be taught by a medically trained individual rather than a geneticist.[6] Due to her advocacy for medical genetics, she was titled the "founding mother" of it.[7] In 1930, while she was still at the University of Western Ontario, Macklin was involved in founding the Canadian Eugenics Society whose committee she served on from 1932 to 1935 and was director of in 1935. Macklin was also a part of the American Society of Human Genetics, serving as its president in 1958.[8]

She was fired from the University of Western Ontario in 1945 and shortly after leaving she received National Research Council funding to work at Ohio State University. Her husband and children stayed behind in Ontario to pursue her research at Ohio State University. However, once she was in an environment that gave her adequate support and respect, Macklin began to conduct cancer research in terms of medical genetics which ended up being the main focus of her career.[6] Over the course of her career, she published over two hundred scientific papers on the topic of medical genetics.[4]

Although Macklin was a pioneer in the field of medical genetics, she was also involved in eugenics which is a belief that the human population can be improved by deterring people with undesirable traits from reproducing and encouraging those the favorable traits to reproduce.[9] By the early 1930s, Macklin had begun to focus her medical attention on hereditary diseases. Since few of these had therapies, often the only viable medical intervention was prevention; i.e., stopping "defective" people from reproducing. Medical genetics, in her mind, was thus tantamount to negative eugenics. She advocated eugenic approaches to many diseases, from cancer to schizophrenia.[1] Over her career, she published over 20 articles on the topic of eugenics, focused on the sterilization of individuals unfit to be parents of the next generation and individuals who had unfavorable attributes. One of her last major research efforts was a large study of the heritability of breast cancer.[10]