Philip Sunshine, a doctor from Stanford University who played an important role in establishing neonatology as a medical specialty, revolutionizing the care of premature and severely ill newborns who previously had a chantine little, died in April of his house, died, died. He was 94 years old.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Diana Sunshine.
Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other doctors were interested in the care of the rewards at the end of the 1950s and early 60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies would pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. In Stanford, he pressed for multiple disciplines for teams or doctors to treat them in special intensive care units. Together with their colleagues, pioneer methods to feed the formula and help breathing with fans.
“We were able to keep babies alive who would not have survived,” said Dr. Sunshine in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everyone simply gives this for granted.”
At the beginning of the 1960s it was a turning point in the care of premature babies.
According to Oxford English Dictionary, the word neonatology was first used in the 1960 book “Diseases of the newborn” by Alexander J. Schaffer, a pediatrician in Baltimore. At that time, the Stanford Neonatology Department, one of the first in the country, was in operation.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s second son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, was born almost six weeks. He died 39 hours later. The crisis was developed on the covers of newspapers throughout the country, pressing federal health authorities to begin to assign money for neonatal research.
“Kennedy’s story was a great turning point,” Dr. Sunshine told Aha News, a publication of the American Hospital Association, in 1998. After that, the money of federal research for neonatal care became much easier to obtain. “
As head of the Stanford Neonatology Department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, maybe even thousands, or doctors who worked in neonatal intensive care units worldwide. When he retired in 2022, at 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was more than 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘original’ in neonatology, the neonatologist of a neonatologist, one of the best in our history,” wrote David K. Stevenson, successor of Dr. Sunshine as head of the Stanford neonatal department, in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011.
Dr. Sunshine acknowledged that the care of stretch marks required technical experience and human connection. Hospitals urged to allow parents to visit the neonatal intensive care units so that they could keep their children, feeling that skin -to -skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
Hello, also the great nurses, more autonomy and encouraged them to speak when they thought the doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses always have caregivers who matter a lot of legs,” said Dr. Sunshine in oral history. “Throughout my career, I have worked with a nursing staff who or recognize problems in the baby before the doctors, and still do it now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”
CCELE QUAINTANCE, a neonatal nurse who worked with Dr. Sunshine for more than 50 years, said in a blog post for Stanford Medicine Children Health that “there is this deep childhood in Phil, for babies, for all of us, for all.”
“Everyone has the same level of importance for him,” he said, adding: “I have seen families cry when he left the service because they were very attached to him.”
The hours were long; The pressure was extraordinary.
“It was a quiet and reassuring presence,” said Dr. Stevenson in an interview. “He said:” If you are going to spend the whole night working your tail, what better way to do it by giving someone 80, 90 years of life? “
Philip Sunshine was born on June 16, 1930 in Denver. His parents, Samuel and Mollie (Fox) Sunshine possessed a pharmacy.
He obtained his degree from the University of Colorado in 1952, and then stayed there for the Medicine School, graduating in 1955.
After his first year of residence in Stanford, he was recruited in the US Navy and served as a lieutenant. When he returned to Stanford in 1959, he trained with Louis Gluck, a pediatrician who later developed the modern neonatal intensive care unit at Yale University.
“It has made me care for newborns and made all people sound so interesting,” Dr. Ir. Sunshine said.
There were no neonatology scholarships at the time, so Dr. Sunshine did an advanced training in pediatric gastroenterology and a scholarship in pediatric metabolism.
“This was a very exciting moment,” said Stanford Medicine’s medicine health blog publication. “People with various origins were contributing their skills to the care of newborns: pulmonologists, cardiologists, people like me who were interested in the GI problems of newborns. I received a lot of information and enthusiasm.
Dr. Sunshine married Sara Elizabeth Vreeland, known as Beth, in 1962.
Together with his wife and daughter Diana, four other children, Rebecca, Samuel, Michael and Stephanie survive; and nine granddaughters.
In many ways, Dr. Sunshine’s sign was an aptronym, a word idically adequate for his occupation and way of being.
“Fully separated from being the father, or grandfather, from neonatology, he really brought the sun to each room,” Susan R. Hintz, Stanford’s neonatologist, said in an interview. “It was a soothing presence, as special in these very stressful moments. The nurses told me all the time,” he is the one that everyone remembers. “
