PEDIATRICS Vol. 82 No. 2 August 1988, pp. 272-274
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Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the National Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Foundation

ABRAHAM B. BERGMAN MD1

1 Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington and Harborview Medical Center, Seattle

When 6-month-old Mark Addison Roe of Greenwich, CT, died suddenly and unexpectedly in October 1958, his parents were told that the cause was "acute bronchial pneumonia." In those days, "it" was called by many names, such as suffocation, overlaying, aspiration, or various forms of pneumonia. The common thread was that all of the terms connoted that parents were either directly, or indirectly, by virtue of failing to secure medical care, responsible for the infant's death.

Mark's death might have been the end of it were it not for the existence of a life insurance policy that his grandparents had bought at the time of his birth.