When Maude Abbott, BA’1890, MCDM’1910, joined McGill’s Department of Pathology, little was known about how to surgically repair damaged hearts.
Through her work as Assistant Curator of McGill’s medical museum (now the Maude Abbott Medical Museum), Abbott collected and studied the hearts of people who had died of cardiac problems. She scoured historical records for accounts of heart disease, meticulously cataloguing cardiac anomalies identified during autopsies. The result was the 1936 Atlas of Congenital Cardiac Disease, which laid the foundations of modern heart surgery.