Dr Mildred Thornton Stahlman, pioneer in neonatal care, dies at 101

Vanderbilt University paediatrician Dr Mildred Thornton Stahlman, whose research on fatal lung disease in newborns led to lifesaving treatments and to the creation in 1961 of one of the first neonatal intensive care units, died on 29 June. She was 101.

On 31 October 1961, Dr Stahlman placed a premature baby who was gasping for breath into a miniature iron lung machine, also known as a negative pressure ventilator, the kind used for children with polio. The baby survived.

That initial success, along with findings from Dr Stahlman’s studies on newborn lambs, helped launch a new era of treating respiratory lung disease.

Shortly after her first success, Dr Stahlman reported that, by 1965, she had used the iron lung machine augmented with positive pressure, to save 11 of 26 babies at Vanderbilt. By the 1970s, negative pressure tanks were jettisoned for positive pressure machines that worked by inflating the lungs. In the 1990s, the use of surfactants extracted from animal lungs dramatically improved the survival of babies with severe disease who required mechanical ventilation.

In the early days of neonatology, Dr Stahlman was one of the few doctors in the world who knew how to thread tiny catheters into the umbilical vessels of newborns to monitor blood oxygen.