Pioneers in Neonatal/Perinatal Medicine: Perinatal Profiles from NeoReviews

From the files of NeoReviews comes this collection of Perinatal Profiles, chosen to provide a glimpse into the lives of the “movers and shakers” in neonatal/perinatal medicine. Much of this collection has been written by the students of these pioneers who have gone on to become key NPM innovators themselves. They provide rare insight into the personalities of their mentors and the development of NPM. You’ll meet such luminaries as:: Alex Minkowski, MD, whose life’s work, including a conference on whether assisted ventilation did more harm than good, led French President Jacques Chirac in 2004 to call him “one of the consciences of the 20th century.” Martin Couney, MD, who in 1896 began 40 years of organizing preterm baby “child hatchery” sideshows to showcase the marvels of incubator technology at expositions, state fairs, traveling circuses—even Coney Island!—showing the public that even the most severely preterm infants had a chance for survival. Elizabeth Blackwell, Marie Putnam Jacobi, Elizabeth Garret, and Madeleine Brès, the first female physicians caring for women and children at the end of the 19th century. All struggled for admission to medical school yet eventually managed to pierce the armor of sex bias. Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis, the Hungarian pioneer of antisepsis who first demonstrated that most childbed fever cases could be prevented—one of the most important discoveries of 19th-century medicine—yet was ridiculed and released in disgrace from his Viennese hospital and medical school faculty posts. Cathy Cropley, the Seattle nurse who wove nurses into the fabric of neonatal resuscitation as team members and instructors, insisting that skill take precedence over title. This collection of 26 key columns was compiled and edited by NeoReviews Editor-in-Chief Alistair G.S. Philip, MD, FRCPE, FAAP, in honor of the 15th anniversary of NeoReviews , the American Academy of Pediatrics’ online journal of neonatology.