Not quite for memory _corruption_ but back when I was writing API code in C, I would place 'sentinels' at each end of my structs.

  struct somestruct {
    int s1;
    int data;
    char * moreData;
    int s2;
  }

When the caller of the API needed to call my code, it had to first call a function to get an instance of the struct. This constructor like code would allocate the memory for the struct, and then set s1 and s2 to 0xDEADBEEF;

The user would then fill out the rest of the struct and pass it back in as an argument to another call.

If either s1 or s2 wasn't 0xDEADBEEF, I would throw an error to the caller.

I helped me catch a lot of cases where the caller to the API had overrun some string while filling out the inputs.