Williamsburg Regional Library

A good time to be born, how science and public health gave children a future, Perri Klass

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-357) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

A good time to be born

bibliography

1137821310

Perri Klass

how science and public health gave children a future

"Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers--of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. 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" --, Provided by publisher

Postmortem poetry and comfort books : literary echoes of child mortality -- "Ma'am, have you ever lost a child?" : child death in Civil War America -- "We might wonder that any survive" : mortality, miasmas, and mother's milk -- "Each has a right to live" : educating mothers and keeping babies alive -- "The plague among children" : diphtheria and the doctors -- "Most dreaded of all the diseases" : scarlet fever, strep, and antibiotics -- "Strides of modern medical science" : preventing polio, treating tuberculosis -- The incubator show : life and death in the delivery room and the nursery -- "Something children always have" : measles and chicken pox -- "Safe to sleep" : postwar parents, postwar pediatricians

adult