Neonatology on the Web

Peter M. Dunn, MA, MD, FRCP, FRCOG, FRCPCH (1929–2021)

www.neonatology.net

Peter M. Dunn, MA, MD, FRCP, FRCOG, FRCPCH (1929–2021)

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

Founder of Perinatal Medicine in the United Kingdom

Peter MacNaughton Dunn was born in Birmingham on June 23, 1929, the fourth child with three older sisters. His father, Naughton Dunn, was an eminent orthopaedic surgeon; his mother, Ethel, had been a nurse. He was educated at Marlborough College and St John’s College, Cambridge, qualifying in medicine in 1953. After pre-registration jobs in Birmingham, he undertook National Service as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving from 1955 to 1957 with the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles during the Malayan Emergency.

It was as a student that Dunn first noticed something that would shape his entire career: the relative neglect of the unborn and newborn infant. On returning to England in 1957, he determined to pioneer a new specialty for which he coined the term “perinatal medicine.” He spent the next decade training in obstetrics, paediatrics, and general practice in Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1967 worked as a senior research fellow at the Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco. In 1968, he received a Cambridge MD for a thesis on congenital postural deformation, particularly congenital dislocation of the hip.

That same year, Dunn was appointed consultant senior lecturer in perinatal medicine and child health at the University of Bristol — the first such post in the United Kingdom. His impact was immediate. He founded the Bristol Perinatal Club, established the first university course on neonatal medicine in the UK for medical students, and in 1970 introduced neonatal intensive care to Bristol. Neonatal mortality fell by 74% within three years.

Among his most consequential clinical contributions was the introduction of continuous positive airway pressure to the UK. In 1971, he was the first in the UK to introduce CPAP in the treatment of respiratory distress syndrome — bringing to British NICUs the technology that George Gregory had pioneered in San Francisco. He also published a guide to the correct depth of insertion of umbilical artery catheters, vital for blood gas monitoring, and was well ahead of his time in questioning the wisdom of immediate cord clamping at birth. He considered it more physiological to wait for the circulation to adapt, allowing blood to be transfused from the placenta to the neonate and improving blood flow to the lungs. He was also among the first to recognise the clinical significance of neonatal polycythaemia and the need to treat it by dilution exchange transfusion.

In 1976, Dunn founded the British Association of Perinatal Medicine with the twenty paediatricians working in major neonatal units across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, becoming its first president. The aims of BAPM were to improve the standard of perinatal care and to bring together those responsible for that care as a team — obstetricians, midwives, paediatricians, and neonatal nurses. He chaired a landmark joint committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Paediatric Association, producing a 1978 report on recommendations for improving infant care in the perinatal period that helped galvanise government and professional attention in the UK. He was also a founding member of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine and served as a WHO consultant from 1970 to 1990.

Under his influence, the perinatal mortality rate in England fell from 30 per 1,000 births in 1965 to 6 per 1,000 in 2019. The perinatal mortality in south-west England moved from being the highest for any region in 1980 to the lowest in 1983.

Dunn retired from clinical practice at 60 but remained prodigiously productive. Between 1989 and 2009 he prepared 108 articles on doctors and others who had made significant contributions to the development of perinatal medicine over 2,000 years, all published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood under the title “Perinatal Lessons from the Past.” These compact biographical essays — many of which are cited on this web site — constitute a unique scholarly archive of the field’s history. Many of these figures are the same physicians profiled in the People gallery on this site, and Dunn’s accounts remain among the most reliable secondary sources for their lives and contributions.

He was awarded the Dutch De Snoo-van’t Hoogerhuijs Medal in 1983 for his work on fetal adaptation to extrauterine life, the first time the award had been made to a paediatrician or to anyone in the UK, and received the British Orthopaedic Association’s Gold Medal in 1986 for his research on congenital dislocation of the hip. In 2001, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health awarded him the James Spence Medal for distinguished contributions to paediatrics — their highest honour. He was made an Honorary FRCPCH and was elected Honorary Fellow of both the RCOG and the European Association of Perinatal Medicine.

He donated his personal library of books and articles on the history of perinatal medicine to BAPM, where it is now housed as the Dunn Perinatal Library. Two annual BAPM lectures — the Founders Lecture and the Peter Dunn Perinatal Lecture — honour his legacy. He died peacefully on 2 February 2021 at the age of 91.

Last Updated on 03/30/26