During his early years as a neonatologist in the 1970s, Dr. Bob White recalls bassinets lined up along the walls of the newborn intensive care unit while nurses looked on like hawks.
Babies were prodded regularly for tests and treatments. Doctors rushed in to the sound of alarms, scaring not just the family whose baby was in distress, but any family looking on. Though normal at the time, even then White knew things needed to change.
“It was kind of a culture shock to walk into that. Even as a medical person, I was immediately overwhelmed by sights and the noise and the bright lights. So it didn’t take me long to figure out this wasn’t the ideal environment for babies to be healing,” he remembered.
“The other piece that was starkly obvious was the absence of families. Back then, we had these preconceived notions that families would bring in germs that would be dangerous to babies—bacteria of various sorts—so we shouldn’t let them touch them.”
Breast milk, too, was taboo in the NICU, he recalled.
“We’ve gone 180 degrees on all of those!” he laughed.
But change didn’t happen overnight.
White received his undergraduate degree from Notre Dame in 1971. After medical school at Johns Hopkins and a stint in Niles, Michigan, White returned to South Bend as a neonatologist hired to create a NICU at what is now Beacon Children’s Hospital. It occurred to him that some of the concerning concepts he had observed in NICUs could be studied and quantified, so he reached out to Notre Dame psychology professor Tom Whitman to begin a partnership with the Department of Psychology. White became adjunct faculty and has remained a beloved instructor for 34 years.
