Margot Shiner

Margot Shiner (nee Last; 4 June 1923 – 31 July 1998) was a German-British

Early life

Margot Last was born on 4 June 1923 to a Jewish family in Berlin, where her father worked as a textile merchant. In 1936, her family fled Nazi Germany to Prague; they settled in London in 1938. She attended Parliament Hill School and received a medical degree from the University of Leeds in 1947. She married Alex Shiner shortly thereafter, and they had three sons.^[1]

Career

After qualifying as a doctor, Shiner returned to London to work as a house officer.

In 1956, Shiner designed a biopsy tube that could be used to take biopsies from children's small intestines and could thereby be used in the diagnosis of childhood coeliac disease, Whipple's disease and nodular lymphoid hyperplasia. She published the details of her technique in The Lancet.^[1] In 1963, she invented a sterile tube that could be used to take uncontaminated bacterial samples from the intestinal cavity;^[2] this allowed microbiologists to study the small intestine in greater detail than previously possible.^[1] Over her career, she authored 80 original articles, 14 book chapters, and the 1983 textbook Ultrastructure of the Small Intestinal Mucosa.^[2]

Death and legacy

Shiner died on 31 July 1998 in

John Walker-Smith credited Shiner's pioneering use of biopsy tubes to diagnose coeliac disease in children with launching paediatric gastroenterology as a distinct subspecialty.^[3] He said of Shiner's technique, "It offered a whole new era of understanding of disorders of the small intestine in childhood."^[4] Her biopsy tube came to be known as the Shiner mucosal biopsy tube.^[5]

References