page_title: Victor A. McKusick
section_title: Publications and research
hierarchical_section_title: Victor A. McKusick / Medical career / Publications and research
caption_attribution_description: English: Victor McKusick taking a photograph of an Amish child's hands during his famous study of genetics of the Amish people.
context_page_description: Victor Almon McKusick 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 is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".
context_section_description: McKusick wrote extensively on the history of medicine, genetics, medical genetics, and about Parkman, Maine. He co-founded Genomics in 1987 with Dr. Frank Ruddle, and served as an editor. He led a Congressionally-chartered committee examining the ethics of testing Abraham Lincoln's tissue for the presence of Marfan syndrome genes.
  His well-known published articles include:
  Probable Assignment of the Duffy Blood Group Locus to Chromosome 1 in Man (1968)
  The Anatomy of the Human Genome: a Neo-Vesalian Basis for Medicine in the 21st Century (2001)
  "On lumpers and splitters, or the nosology of genetic disease."
  In a 2005 paper presented by M.I. Poling, McKusick said:
  I have always told my students, residents, and fellows, if you want to really get on top of some topic, you need to know how it got from where it was to how it is now. I was always strong on eponyms, too—like Marfan syndrome, Freeman–Sheldon syndrome, Down syndrome, Tay–Sachs disease, etc. On rounds, the resident or student would present a patient with some particular condition, and I would always ask, so who is so and so for whom the disease was named.  This prompts thought and research into the disease or condition itself to find out who first described it and, therefore, for whom it was named.
caption: Victor McKusick taking a picture of an Amish child's hands during his study of the Amish.
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