Medical Genetics Studies of the Amish: Selected Papers

SCARCE COLLECTION OF MEDICAL GENETIC STUDIES OF THE AMISH BY VICTOR MCKUSICK, FATHER OF MEDICAL GENETICS.

212x28 cm hardcover, gray cloth binding, cancelled handstamp MD Class of 1996 to front and back endpapers, i-x, 525 pp, many illustrations, pedigrees. Very good in custom archival mylar cover. FROM THE PREFACE BY VICTOR McKUSICK: "In part, studies of the Amish at Johns Hopkins were an outgrowth, a fringe benefit, of university committee work. I was a member of the faculty committee advising the Johns Hopkins Press when it received the manuscript for John Hostetler's Amish Society, in the fall of 1962. The closed nature of the Amish groups, with persons leaving but almost no one entering because of strict endogamy and no proselytizing; the descent from a limited number of immigrant founders; the good genealogic records-all impressed me as useful characteristics for genetic studies, particularly of recessive traits. (We had already done extensive pedigree studies of several dominants and X-linked recessives.) Hostetler's book sparked a collaboration that still continues. Professor Hostetler has taught me much about sociology and about the Amish and other groups he has studied, such as the Hutterites. Importantly, he introduced my co-workers and me to Amish, whom I consider fast friends and who would and could help us with our studies."

VICTOR ALMON MCKUSICK (1921 2008) was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM) and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM). He is widely known as the father of medical genetics. During World War II The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine could not fill its classes. Therefore, for the first time since the school's founding in 1893, the school temporarily discontinued requiring a baccalaureate degree for admission. Victor applied during his sixth semester at Tufts, and began in the fall of 1942, as one of the first, of very few, who ever entered the school without a bachelor's degree. He was offered the prestigious William Osler Internship in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and chose to remain at Hopkins for his residency. In 1956 McKusick traveled to Copenhagen to speak about the heritable disorders of connective tissue at the first international congress of human genetics. The meeting looms as the birthplace of the medical genetics field. In the following decades, McKusick went on to head the Chronic Disease Clinic and created and chaired a new Division of Medical Genetics at Hopkins beginning in 1957. In 1973, he served as Physician-in-Chief, William Osler Professor of Medicine, and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine. McKusick's study of genetics among the Amish is perhaps his most famous research. McKusick listed fifteen advantages to studying genetics among the Amish. Today, these fifteen reasons are argued to be true as well. McKusick's findings led many other researchers to study hereditary related diseases in the 1960s and 1970s. Other researchers and McKusick cite the Amish as working cooperatively with researchers to determine the reason for inherited diseases. McKusick published his official findings from working with the Amish in 1978, titled Medical Genetic Studies of the Amish (offered here).

Product Info

Publisher: Johns Hopkins Press

Year: 1978

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

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