Medicine: Archiater to Preemies

Any Monday morning, until the freeze sets in, nurses at the windows of Helsinki’s handsome, modern Children’s Clinic can see a pint-sized (under 5 ft.), boyish-looking man step briskly up the drive with a 10- or 15-lb. pike slung over his shoulder. The fisherman is Dr. Arvo Ylppo, passing from his weekend avocation to his lifelong vocation. Ylppo, the only man in Finland to bear the proud title of archiater (chief physician, an honorific designation dating from ancient Greece), is the world’s pioneering authority on premature babies.

When Ylppo began practicing 40 years ago, says a colleague, “doctors thought that prematures just die and that’s all.” Dr. Ylppo was determined to change this. As early as 1913 came a study of jaundice from blood destruction, which sometimes afflicts the newborn. By 1917 Ylppo had passed a tube into his own stomach and pumped oxygen in to prove that the life-essential gas could be given by this route (he was the first to apply this technique to “preemies”). Then came detailed studies of the physiology of preemies (showing just what development handicaps they suffered), and other vital topics, such as the effects of a mother’s illnesses on her unborn child, and what substances, from hormones to antibodies, pass through the placenta from mother to child.

Last week twice-married Grandfather Ylppo (his youngest child is only two) turned 70. To honor him, colleagues had established the Ylppo Award, to be given every five years to pediatricians for special achievements. Ylppo himself was a tiny, inconspicuous figure among the frock-coated dignitaries in the great hall of Helsinki University as the Ylppo gold medal was bestowed on Harvard’s Professor Clement Smith, outstanding researcher into the breathing mechanism of the newborn (he advises against spanking them). Said Disciple Smith: “It is often stated that Arvo Ylppo invented the premature baby. I doubt this, but it certainly was fortunate for premature infants that Arvo Ylppo was invented.”