Mildred Thornton (Millie) Stahlman (1922-2024)
Mildred T. Stahlman was born on July 31, 1922 in Nashville, Tennesse. She graduated from the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science in 1943, then obtained her medical degree from Vanderbilt in 1946, one of only four women in a class of 50. She did a general internship at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland and a pediatric internship at Boston Children’s, followed by an assistant residency in pediatrics at Vanderbilt, an exchange fellowship at the Royal Caroline Institute in Stockholm, and a cardiac residency at La Rabida Sanitarium in Chicago. She joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 1951 and stayed there for the rest of her career.
Her initial research was in pediatric cardiology, but became interested in the care of premature babies, and she founded the modern neonatal intensive care unit at Vanderbilt in 1959 and helped initiate the regionalization of high-risk newborn care in Tennessee in 1973. She also started the Vanderbilt neonatology fellowship training program. Dr. Stahlman was first in North America to use assisted ventilation successfully for a baby with hyaline membrane disease (the original term for Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or RDS) in 1961.(1) (The baby survived and became a NICU nurse at Vanderbilt!) Later, Dr. Stahlman published her experience with the ventilation of 80 infants with RDS in the February 1970 issue of Journal of Pediatrics.(4)
“Today, Martha Lott, the first baby Dr. Stahlman fitted into the iron lung machine, is a nurse in the very place where her life was saved. “I knew the story and I was tested for years,” Ms. Lott said, adding that Dr. Stahlman was her godmother.”– New York Times, July 2, 2024
Although Yale is often cited as having been the site of the first modern NICU under the leadership of Dr. Gluck, references forwarded by Dr. John Reese make it clear that Dr. Stahlman operated one of the first, if not the first, modern NICUs as we think of them today. In a short communication at the May 8-10, 1962 meeting of the SPR, she described taking care of four newborns with hyaline membrane disease (RDS) with negative and positive pressure ventilation, with two surviving. The care included left atrial pressure monitoring using a venous umbilical catheter, blood gases, esophageal pressure monitoring using a saline-filled catheter in the esophagus, and EKG and temperature monitoring. Quite remarkable, given the technology available at that time.
Dr. Stahlman was an author on over 100 peer-reviewed articles on neonatal care. She also published several papers on ethical and moral issues related to care of premature infants.(2,3)
One question Stahlman tackled in her research was why there are now so many premature births in the U.S. “Prematurity has become largely a social rather than a medical disease in the United States,” she concluded in 2005, publishing her findings in the Journal of Perinatology. “The rapid rise of hospitals for profit with shareholders’ interests dominating the interests of our patients was followed by neonatology for profit, and profitable it has been.”
Dr. Stahlman was elected to the Institute of Medicine and was President of the American Pediatric Society (1984), received the AAP’s Virginia Apgar Award in 1987, and the American Pediatric Society’s John Howland Award in 1996. One of the true pioneers and most revered figures in the field of neonatology, she never married or fully retired and had no children of her own. She continued to work as a Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology at Vanderbilt University until her death at home on June 29, 2024 at the age of 101.
(1) Stahlman MT, Young WC, Payne G. Studies of ventilatory aids in hyaline membrane disease. Am J Dis Child 1962;104:526.
(2) Stahlman, M.T. (1984). “Newborn intensive care: Success or failure?”. The Journal of Pediatrics. 105 (1): 162–167. doi:10.1016/S0022-3476(84)80386-8. PMID 6737135.
(3) Stahlman MT (Mar 1979). “Ethical dilemmas in perinatal medicine”. Journal of Pediatrics. 94 (3): 516–520. doi:10.1016/s0022-3476(79)80640-x. PMID 423058.
(4) Stahlman, MT et al, “Negative pressure assisted ventilation in infants with hyaline membrane disease,” Journal of Pediatrics 76(20:174-182, February, 1970.
- “Mildred Stahlman: Pioneer in Neonatal Intensive Care” at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital
- Mildred T. Stahlman in the Tennessee Health Care Hall of Fame
- Mildred T. Stahlman in Wikipedia
- Neonatologist Mildred Stahlman on Honorary Unsubscribe
- Historical Review and Recent Advances, “Assisted Ventilation in Newborn Infants,” by Mildred T. Shalman, 1980.
- “Dr. Mildred Thornton Stahlman, Pioneer in Neonatal Care, Dies at 101,” obituary in the New York Times, July 2, 2024.
Last Updated on 11/24/24