Classics in pediatrics. The smallest preterm infants: reasons for optimism and new dilemmas.

摘要

When Arthur Kopelman published his commentary, "The Smallest Preterm Infants: Reasons for Optimism and New Dilemmas," in the American Journal of Diseases of Children in 1978, neonatology was approaching a tipping point in the United States. Prior to the 1960s, most hospitals had little to offer preterm babies beyond incubators and good nursing care. Premature baby nurseries were backwaters of the hospital, dominated by nurses rather than physicians. This "hands-off' era came to an end when the routine use of high-oxygen incubators in the 1950s led to the greatest iat-rogenic disaster ever to befall neonatal medicine: the blinding of more than 10 000 infants from retinopa-thy of prematurity.