A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future
Perri Klass
Dec 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Randye Kaye
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11 hr 15 min
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Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O'Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln's four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. For children of the poor, immigrants, enslaved people, and their descendants, the chances of dying were far worse.
The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life.
The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life.
Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O'Neill wrote about and mourned t...
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About the author
Perri Klass is a practicing pediatrician, an acclaimed author of fiction & nonfiction, & a prizewinning journalist. She has won five O. Henry Awards for her short stories, including three of the stories in "Love & Modern Medicine". Her fiction includes two novels, "Recombinations & Other Women's Children", & a collection of short stories, "I Am Having an Adventure". She has also written two collections of essays about medicine, "A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student" & "Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training". Her columns & articles have appeared in the "New York Times Magazine", the "Washington Post", the "Boston Globe", "Discover", & "Parenting". She recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for an article in "Gourmet", "The Lunch Box as Battlefield." Both Klass's fiction & her journalism have dealt with issues of medicine & society. In her medical career she practices pediatrics at Dorchester House, a neighborhood health center in Boston, & is medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out & Read, dedicated to making books & literacy promotion part of pediatric primary care. Klass lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Larry Wolff, a professor of history at Boston College, & their children.
Perri Klass is a practicing pediatrician, an acclaimed author of fiction & nonfiction, & a prizewinning journalist. She has won five O. Henry Awards for her short stories, including three of the stories in "Love & Modern Medicine". Her fiction includes two novels, "Recombinations & Other Women's ...
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