Philip Sunshine, MD, professor emeritus of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, died April 5 at his home in Cupertino, California. He was 94.
Sunshine was a founding practitioner of neonatology, the care of fragile, often premature newborns. When he began training as a physician in the 1950s, the medical specialty did not yet exist, and more than half of premature infants died.
In the ensuing decades, Sunshine contributed to significant advances in newborn care, such as developing protocols to put preemies on ventilators and provide them with nutrition. When he retired in 2022, aged 92, the field he guided had evolved in spectacular fashion: Today, more than 90% of preemies survive.
“Phil Sunshine was a legend in neonatology who used his scientific and clinical acumen to improve the care of sick newborns everywhere,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at Stanford University. “He also had a huge impact on the field through his extraordinary talent for leadership and collaboration and through the many physicians he trained, who carried his approach to neonatal intensive care across the country.”
A “people person” who believed good ideas could come from anyone, Sunshine pioneered innovations that fostered connection, including welcoming parents to their infants’ bedsides in the neonatal intensive care unit and bringing obstetric and newborn care under one roof at Stanford, a change that fostered major advances in maternal-fetal medicine.
“To him, each premature baby was a person with a future,” said David Stevenson, MD, the Harold K. Faber Professor in Pediatrics, whom Sunshine trained as a neonatologist in the 1970s and who worked alongside him for decades. “He would say, ‘If you are going to stay up all night and become exhausted providing medical care on someone’s behalf, isn’t it wonderful that you are giving them 80 or 90 years of life?’”
Sunshine’s kindness, warmth and lack of pretention belied an underlying drive to get to the bottom of thorny medical problems, his colleagues said. If his team was bogged down by details — piles of lab results, for instance — he could zero in on what would be best for tiny patients and their families.
“He had real clarity of purpose, and it was very baby- and family-focused,” said Susan Hintz, MD, the Robert L. Hess Family Professor and director of the Fetal and Pregnancy Health Program at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.
Doctor in the making
Sunshine was born June 16, 1930, in Denver, the only child of pharmacists Mollie Alice Sunshine and Samuel Sunshine. He earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Colorado and interned at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. He arrived at Stanford in 1956 as a medical resident.
“He knew from a very, very young age that he wanted to be a doctor,” said his daughter Diana Sunshine.
After his first year of residency, Sunshine was drafted and served two years in the U.S. Navy. When he returned in 1959, the School of Medicine had moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto, and the field of neonatology — named that year — was poised for huge changes. The late pioneering neonatologist Lou Gluck, MD, was running Stanford’s newborn nursery, Sunshine recalled in 2022 interview about his career.
“He turned me on to caring for newborns and made everything sound so interesting,” Sunshine said.
After residencies in pediatrics and gastroenterology and a fellowship in pediatric metabolism, Sunshine was hired as a faculty member in pediatrics at Stanford Medicine. He later directed the Clinical Research Center for Premature Infants and led the divisions of neonatology and gastroenterology in the department of pediatrics. He rose to the rank of professor and became the second holder of the Howard K. Farber Endowed Professorship in Pediatrics. He also served as chief of pediatrics at the University of Southern California and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for several years in the 1980s before returning to Stanford.
Along the way, Sunshine shaped Stanford’s culture of innovating for babies. In 1962, two of his colleagues were among the first U.S. physicians to use a ventilator to help a newborn breathe. Sunshine and his team refined neonatal ventilation techniques, sometimes by capitalizing on things that went wrong with the equipment. For instance, one nursery ventilator had a sticky valve, which provided more time for the baby to breathe in and more appropriate air pressure. This, the team soon realized, improved the infant’s ability to exchange air and helped babies get better faster.
His work saved thousands of babies’ lives, and he made so many people joyful. He did so much good in the world.”
Sunshine’s research in the 1960s and ’70s established the groundwork for how to feed newborns intravenously, an important innovation for babies born too prematurely to digest breast milk.
“Phil’s No.1 thing was nutrition and metabolism,” said John Kerner, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist and longtime colleague, now professor emeritus at Stanford Medicine. Sunshine’s focus on preemies’ nutrient needs made Stanford’s neonatology program unique, Kerner said.
In the mid-1960s, after nurses told Sunshine about one mother’s persistent desire to be in the nursery with her baby, his team began allowing parents into the neonatal intensive care unit and conducted research on whether the change increased babies’ infection risk. Finding it was safe, they began including parents in caregiving for hospitalized newborns.
When Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford was being planned in the 1980s, Sunshine convinced Lucile Packard that mothers and babies needed to be cared for under one roof. His advice led to the construction of a larger hospital than originally planned, including obstetric facilities and beds for mothers with risky pregnancies who were awaiting delivery. This plan allowed Stanford to develop better care for high-risk pregnancies and newborns and is now widely emulated.
Sunshine also established strong regional connections between hospitals in California, traveling throughout the state to share his expertise and help other teams improve their neonatal care.
“Phil’s philosophy was that this work was a team effort, no single physician could do this, and nurses and other health care professionals were equally important,” Stevenson said.
Sunshine also mentored hundreds of neonatology residents, staying in touch with them and following their careers closely.
“He expected us to know everything you could possibly know about the practice of medicine for newborns,” Stevenson said. “And he was someone you could confide in. For many of us, his passing is like losing an academic father.”
Keys to a rewarding life
Sunshine met Beth Vreeland at Stanford in the fall of 1961, where he was a young faculty member in pediatrics and she had an administrative job. They married in February 1962 and had five children.
The kids grew up infused with his philosophy that loving your job was a solid foundation for a rewarding life.
“He was a hard charger. He and his team were taking the most technologically advanced therapeutics and applying them to the most vulnerable, tiny individuals,” said his daughter Diana Sunshine. “And he was very practical: The things that mattered were doing great work, having a great team, building a strong community, family, sports and jokes.”
He loved to play tennis and for years organized colleagues into the SWAT Team, aka Sunshine’s Wednesday Afternoon Tennis. An avid football and baseball fan, Sunshine was especially thrilled when the San Francisco 49ers made it to the Super Bowl for the first time in 1982. He invited about 100 people to the family’s home to watch the game.
He also had a legendary sense of humor.
“Whoever could tell the best joke got his attention,” Diana Sunshine said, adding that the youngest sibling, her sister Stephanie, became an especially adept joke-teller for this reason.
Always staying connected
Later in life, Sunshine stepped back from some leadership positions but cared for babies 30 hours per week in the Packard Children’s intermediate care nursery until age 92. He also stayed connected to seemingly everyone in his field.
“He almost always had a phone in his hand to talk to somebody,” Hintz said. “So many people told me, ‘Oh yeah, I have a monthly phone call with him,’ or ‘I reached out recently and he let me talk to him for 45 minutes.’ He would really sit down and ask people about their lives.”
Sunshine was an enthusiastic grandparent — while never ceasing to be a neonatologist. “He loves babies, and when we had babies, he wanted to hold the babies, talk to the babies, test the reflexes of the babies,” Diana Sunshine said. Once, when one of her daughters was four months old, she came down with a respiratory germ. Grandpa came to check in, took one look at the baby, and said, “‘We’re going to the ER now,’” Diana Sunshine recalled. “She ended up having pneumonia. He just knew.”
Two nights before he passed away, Sunshine and his wife had dinner with Hintz and her husband. Sunshine was making them laugh with jokes they’d never heard before, Hintz said.
“Phil, are you developing new material?!?” she asked him.
Sunshine received many academic honors, including the Ross Award in Research from the Western Society of Pediatric Research in 1970, the Joseph W. St. Geme, Jr. Education Award from the same group in 1997, the Virginia Apgar Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2001 and a Legends of Neonatology award given in 2015.
His Stanford Medicine colleagues also found lighthearted ways to honor him: In 2005, Kerner and another colleague, the late David Smith, MBBS, associate professor of pediatrics, wrote a song called “The Ballad of Phil Sunshine” which they performed to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine.” Hintz recalled the neonatology team ordering bracelets that said “WWPSD?” — “What Would Phil Sunshine Do?” — to remind them to keep babies’ and parents’ needs at the forefront of their decision-making.
“He lived this incredibly vibrant and impactful life,” Hintz said. “His work saved thousands of babies’ lives, and he made so many people joyful. He did so much good in the world.”
Sunshine is survived by his wife of 63 years, Sara Elizabeth (Beth) Sunshine; children Rebecca, Sam, Michael, Diana and Stephanie Sunshine; and nine grandchildren.
Donations in his memory can be made to the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, which also has a page to share memories and messages of support with his family.
