In the mid-1960s, it was routine for hospital nurseries to bar parents, and even limit visits from doctors, to prevent infection in vulnerable infants. At Stanford’s neonatal intensive care unit, pediatric gastroenterologist Philip Sunshine would change that.
Photo: Stanford Medicine Children’s Health
He listened as nurses lamented over a mother who, every evening, would peer through nursery windows to see her sick infant. Sunshine and his team not only let the mother in but also conducted pioneering research that showed that allowing parents to visit neonates at the bedside did not increase rates of infection.
The research transformed neonatology into a field centered not just on babies but on families. Over the past 60 years, the survival rate for preemies has increased from less than 50 percent to more than 90 percent, in part due to newborns receiving the physiological benefits of skin-to-skin contact. Today, nearly all U.S. NICUs—which care for about 8.4 percent of newborns—are open to parents.
Philip Sunshine, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and one of the founding fathers of neonatology, died on April 5. He was 94.
Sunshine grew up in Denver as an only child, a motivating factor in his and his wife’s later decision to have five children in five years. “He wanted a huge family because he just loved people,” says his daughter Diana. “He especially loved babies.” Sunshine earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Colorado, then interned at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. As a medical resident at Stanford, he met Louis Gluck, who designed the modern NICU and sparked Sunshine’s interest in the emerging field of neonatology.
“Babies are just wonderful people. People think they’re just babies, but each one has a different personality,” says close friend David Stevenson, a professor of pediatrics and one of Sunshine’s early trainees. “Isn’t it a wonderful thing,” he recalls Sunshine saying. “We’re basically giving a person a life, which could be as long as 90 years.”
As a Stanford faculty member, Sunshine took charge of the Premature Research Center, one of the first of its kind in the country. He refined neonatal ventilation techniques, improved intravenous infant nutrition, and diagnosed and treated metabolic and gastrointestinal disorders. He also worked with Stanford children’s hospital benefactor Lucile Packard, ’35, to bring obstetrics and the NICU under one roof in 1991.
His equal respect for each of his colleagues—whether doctor, nurse, or receptionist—shaped generations of physicians, and his jokes echoed down the hallways until his retirement at 92. “He lived up to his surname,” says Stevenson.
In addition to Diana, Sunshine is survived by his wife of 63 years, Beth; children Rebecca, Sam, ’86, Michael, and Stephanie; and nine grandchildren.
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
