VUMC icon Mildred Stahlman to figure in ‘monumental’ exhibit at Nashville’s Parthenon

When sculptor Alan LeQuire began planning his new “Monumental Figures” exhibit for the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, one person kept coming to mind: Mildred T. Stahlman, MD, who pioneered the treatment of lung disease in premature infants at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Although she was but 5 feet, 2 inches tall, with piercing blue eyes and hair usually kept neatly in a bun, Stahlman had a fierce reputation among the physicians she trained. Her severe interrogations during rounds could reduce some of them to tears.

The woman LeQuire knew as a close family friend was completely different. Stahlman, who died on June 29, 2024, at 101 years old, graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1946, the same year as his father, the late Vanderbilt pathologist Virgil LeQuire, MD.

As a child, “I called her Aunt Millie,” said LeQuire, 70. On the wards, “she could be notoriously mean … She was very stringent with the rules and protocols she developed for treating premature infants … The side we saw of her was generous and kind.”

A 6-foot-tall clay statue of Stahlman that, on a pedestal, will exhibit at about 9 feet tall will be among 24 “Monumental Figures” sculpted by LeQuire that will be exhibited at the Parthenon June 13 to Sept. 21.

Parthenon reception

The Parthenon’s presentation of LeQuire’s contemporary art upstairs in the naos (inner temple) coincides with another new exhibit of his work downstairs — “Goddess in Progress,” which commemorates the 35th anniversary of the unveiling of his full-scale replica of the Athena statue that was in the original Parthenon of ancient Athens, Greece.

A free opening reception will be held at the Parthenon from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 12. The Parthenon Symposia series also will present a free in-person Artist Talk with LeQuire at 6 p.m. June 24. Reservations are required for both events. 

LeQuire said he chose mostly women for his “Monumental Figures” exhibit, including singer Joan Baez and Nashville’s Dorothy Brown, MD, the first Black woman elected to the Tennessee General Assembly, because “the Parthenon, in my imagination, is a space that honors women.”

Mildred Stahlman was natural for the exhibit. “Millie was a big part of my life,” LeQuire said. “She believed in me.” Stahlman supported his first major public art commission, a sculpture of mother and child completed in 1981 for Vanderbilt University Hospital.

Stahlman is “monumental,” of course, because of the profound impact she had on the lives of premature babies. She is credited with establishing at VUMC the nation’s first newborn intensive care unit to use monitored respiratory therapy in babies born with damaged lungs.

In the mid-1970s, she also helped regionalize newborn intensive care services in Tennessee, and she trained generations of physician-scientists from around the world.

LeQuire remembers the sheep she kept for her research on lung development at his family’s farm in northwest Williamson County and in a grassy courtyard of the old Vanderbilt hospital now known as Medical Center North.

By studying fetal lambs, Stahlman and her colleagues developed ways to diagnose and monitor hyaline membrane disease, the failure of the alveoli, or small sacs in the lungs, to expand with air. When severe, this condition, also known as respiratory distress syndrome, was nearly always fatal.

Developing infant “iron-lung” machines

In the mid-1950s, Stahlman began experimenting with infant negative pressure “iron-lung” machines originally developed for polio victims. The goal was to ventilate premature babies until their lungs matured sufficiently for them to breathe on their own.

On Oct. 31, 1961, a baby girl was born at Vanderbilt hospital two months prematurely and gasping for breath. With the permission of her parents and pediatrician, she was placed in a breathing machine.

Stahlman slept on a folding bed in a lab next door so that she could monitor the baby day and night. “On the fifth day,” she recalled in 2005, “we managed to get her weaned off.” That baby grew up to be a mother of two and a neonatal nurse at VUMC.

Stahlman was intense and demanding when it came to her residents and fellows. “They had to have everything in order,” recalled former fellow and longtime colleague Hakan Sundell, MD. “If a chart wasn’t right, she threw it … across the room. And it was a metal-bound chart!”

But on her Humphreys County farm, where she kept Arabian horses and a pack of rescue dogs, she was warm and welcoming. “Mildred loved telling stories,” LeQuire recalled. “I still hear her voice and laugh. She had a wonderful laugh … Underneath, she was a very loving person.”

As Stahlman, who never married, put it: “Virgil and his family have been my second family.” That love of family and down-to-earth generosity is what LeQuire wanted to represent in sculpture.

“The point of the exhibit is not to single out individuals as being especially worthy of praise,” he explained. “The idea is that we’re all monumental because we all have that energy, the living presence that I’m trying to capture in inanimate materials.”

LeQuire can relate his art to the medical miracles that Mildred Stahlman achieved. Just as a lump of clay “awakens” when molded into human form, she devoted herself to preserving the “spark of life” in babies born too early.

“It was,” he said, “the motivation of her life.”