| Abstract: | Health professionals are collecting and charting data about the family history of their patients in order, to determine if a predisposition to heart, stroke, cancer and other debilitating conditions can be detected or alleviated through patient.education and preventive medicine. Family history-taking for the purposes of preventive medicine is introduced, along with a brief history of the field. The pedigree chart and the genogram are described and their use by health personnel is discussed. A brief search strategy on MEDLINE and a selected bibliography are presented to aid the health sciences librarian to find information on the family history, genograms or pedigree charts. |
