Ethel Collins Dunham

After several years of travel and leisure pursuits, she decided she wanted to study medicine and enrolled in a physics class at Hartford High School.

She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1914 and began her medical training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine that same year with her friend and life partner, Martha May Eliot.

She introduced numerous innovations at Yale, including buying a car so that interns could perform home visits for new mothers and their babies.

She also reorganized the dispensary appointment system and negotiated with the chief of obstetrics to allow pediatricians to help care for new babies in the hospital nursery.

The results of her first study appeared in 1936, and in 1943 her guidelines were published as Standards and Recommendations for the Hospital Care of Newborn Infants, Full Term and Premature.