© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
LEADING ARTICLE
British Association of Perinatal Medicine
The British Association of Perinatal Medicine: the first 25 years (1976–2000)
Emeritus Professor of Perinatal Medicine and Child Health, University of Bristol, Southmead Hospital, Bristol BS10 5NB, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor Dunn, Department of Perinatal Medicine and Child Health, University of Bristol, Southmead Hospital, Bristol BS10 7AD, UK;
p.m.dunn@bristol.ac.uk
The founding, achievements, and aspirations of the British Association of Perinatal Medicine are reviewed
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Although there were pioneers in the 1930s and 1940s such as Dr Mary Crosse of Sorrento in Birmingham, newborn care in the United Kingdom was very neglected in the first half of the 20th century.1 In hospital, newborn babies were for the most part looked after by nursery nurses, midwives, and junior obstetricians. Two things changed this: the creation of the NHS in 1948 and the introduction of the umbilical exchange transfusion for Rh haemolytic disease, which established an entrée for paediatricians into maternity hospitals. But progress was slow and many errors in management were practiced. In the nurseries of a teaching maternity hospital in 1959 where I was neonatal registrar, there were no incubators, no technology, and no rooming in.
Why had newborn care been so neglected? Well, there were more babies than were needed and a fairly widespread attitude of "survival of the
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