The history of U.S. cancer registration began in the:

• A. 1890s
• B. 1940s
• C. 1920s
• D. 1960s

Answer: (C)

The key idea here is how cancer data collection began in a systematic way in the United States. In the 1920s, the first organized tumor registries started to appear, as physicians and public health officials began recording new cancer cases in a standardized way. This marked the shift from scattered, anecdotal reporting to structured collection of incidence and basic patient information, which made it possible to study cancer patterns, trends, and outcomes on a population level. Those early registries laid the groundwork for later, broader state and national cancer surveillance programs. While growth and expansion continued in subsequent decades, the 1920s are when this history of systematic cancer registration truly began. The other dates don’t reflect the start of organized cancer registration in the U.S. history.