Though SIDS is a true condition and is the highest cause of infant mortality, this doctor discovered that many early cases of "crib deaths" were not in fact due to a mysterious disease, but were due to infanticide. Infant apnea monitors surfaced around this time. Dr. Susarla
Pathologist, pioneering researcher on SIDS, and mother of 11 children
The photograph shows Dr. Marie Valdés-Dapena performing an autopsy. She is nine months pregnant. She is watching a clock - timing her contractions, determined to complete the job before delivering her own baby.
In that picture, vividly recalled by her daughter Cris, are hints of an extraordinary life to come: a pioneer in the study of sudden infant death syndrome; a leading pediatric pathologist who was among the first to recognize what is now known as child abuse; and a working mother of 11 children in an era when few women worked and far fewer were doctors.
Dr. Valdés-Dapena, 91, who was best known to the public as a pathologist in the biggest maternal infanticide case in recorded history - Marie Noe's murder of eight babies in Kensington - died Sunday at the Rose Tree Place retirement community near Media. She had struggled with advanced dementia for many years, her family said.
"She was warm as toast and never, ever, ever too busy to devote what seemed like all the time in the world to the lowliest, us residents," said Sarah Long, who arrived at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children as a resident in 1970 and who has been chief of infectious diseases for 35 years. "Her owlish glasses would fall down her nose as she was doing an autopsy. She would push them back with a great big smile and tell you something she had just noticed."
In 1944, when Dr. Valdés-Dapena graduated from Temple University School of Medicine, "pathology was the top of the medical profession," said M. Daria Haust, professor emerita at the University of Western Ontario; pathologists found the diseases.
St. Christopher's, at the time Temple's teaching hospital for pediatrics, was an international leader in pathology. But hardly anything was known about postmortems on infants.
Moonlighting at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, Dr. Valdés-Dapena encountered "crib deaths": babies who went to sleep healthy and were dead in the morning, with no clues to be found during autopsies. She had investigators visit homes, and put pins on a big map to find patterns.
It was one of the earliest scientific examinations of what later became known as sudden infant death syndrome. In the 1960s and '70s, Dr. Valdés-Dapena was a leading researcher and the chief debunker of various SIDS theories, from viruses to milk allergies. Many such deaths are still unexplained, but after recommendations in the 1990s that babies be placed on their backs to sleep, mortality plummeted.
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