Philip Sunshine, a Stanford University physician who played an important role in establishing neonatology as a medical specialty, revolutionizing the care of premature and critically ill newborns who previously had little chance of survival, died on April 5 at his home in Cupertino, Calif. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Diana Sunshine.
Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”
The early 1960s were a turning point in the care of premature babies.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word neonatology was used for the first time in the 1960 book “Diseases of Newborn” by Alexander J. Schaffer, a pediatrician in Baltimore. By that time, Stanford’s neonatology department — one of the first in the country — was up and running.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s second son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, was born nearly six weeks premature. He died 39 hours later. The crisis unfolded on the front pages of newspapers around the country, putting pressure on the federal health authorities to begin allocating money for neonatal research.