Pulmonary syndrome versus jaundice
				Fifty years ago, "pulmonary syndrome, " later referred to as hyaline membrane syndrome, was a major concern, and quite widely attributed to the new vogue of early umbilical cord clamping.  The youngest son of President John F Kennedy died of hyaline membrane disease (see Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Bouvier_Kennedy)
			Gunther (1957) commented that even while pulsations of the cord continued, cessation of placental transfusion was often apparent, "as if a main reservoir had been filled," and she cited the research of Jaykka (1957) who determined that inflation of the lungs occurred with increasing blood flow into the alveolar capillaries - the shift of blood volume from the placenta to the lungs.
			Desmond et al (1959) documented continuing pulsation of the umbilical cord stump in newborn infants, and were able to correlate this with early respiratory distress.  The lungs, not the amputated placenta, should become the target of respiratory blood flow after birth.
		Gunther commented on the increasing fear that increased intake of placental blood could cause severe jaundice.  She noted, however that only one of the 50 babies in her study developed jaundice - and it should be noted that bilirubin levels are normally high in newborn infants.  Several investigators of erythroblastosis fetalis had already for many years observed that bilirubin only gets into the brain if the blood-brain barrier is compromised by anoxia or sepsis (Orth 1875, Schmorl 1904, Zimmerman and Yannet 1933).  Lucey et al. (1964) would later demonstrate that bilirubin stains only the subcortical nuclei susceptible to damage in monkeys subjected to experimental asphyxiation at birth.