Philip Sunshine, 94, Dies; Physician Who Pioneered Treatment of Premature Babies

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.

“The Kennedy story was a big turning point,” Dr. Sunshine told AHA News, a publication of the American Hospital Association, in 1998. “After that, federal research money for neonatal care became much easier to get.”

As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.

“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”

Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.

He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.

“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”

Cecele Quaintance, a neonatal nurse who worked with Dr. Sunshine for more than 50 years, said in a blog post for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health that “there is this deep kindness in Phil — to babies, to us, to everybody.”

“Everybody has the same level of importance to him,” she said, adding: “I’ve watched families cry when he was going off service because they were so attached to him.”

The hours were long; the pressure was extraordinary.

“He was a calming, reassuring presence and totally unflappable,” Dr. Stevenson said in an interview. “He would say, ‘If you’re going to spend all night in the hospital working your tail off, what better way to do that than 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, owned a pharmacy.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado in 1952, and then stayed there for medical school, graduating in 1955.

After his first year of residency at Stanford, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy and served as a lieutenant. When he returned to Stanford in 1959, he trained under Louis Gluck, a pediatrician who later developed the modern neonatal intensive care unit at Yale University.

“He turned me on to caring for newborns and made everything sound so interesting,” Dr. Sunshine said.

There were no neonatology fellowships back then, so Dr. Sunshine pursued advanced training in pediatric gastroenterology and a fellowship in pediatric metabolism.

“This was a very exciting time,” he said in the Stanford Medicine Children’s Health blog post. “People with various backgrounds were bringing their skills to the care of newborns: pulmonologists, cardiologists, people like me who were interested in GI problems of newborns. I picked up a lot of information and enthusiasm from them, and we had many opportunities to change how babies were cared for.”

Dr. Sunshine married Sara Elizabeth Vreeland, known as Beth, in 1962.

Along with his wife and daughter Diana, he is survived by four other children, Rebecca, Samuel, Michael and Stephanie; and nine grandchildren.

In many ways, Dr. Sunshine’s surname was an aptronym — a word ideally suited to his occupation and way of being.

“Totally separate from being the father — or the grandfather — of neonatology, he really did bring sunshine into every room,” Susan R. Hintz, a neonatologist at Stanford, said in an interview. “He was a soothing presence, especially in these very stressful moments. Nurses would tell me all the time, ‘He’s the one that everyone remembers.’”