All of you for showing up. We are not able to host events that are store spaces, argument of authors and readers is still here. We are grateful for your support and for the chance to make the space for conversation and connection. Now just couple of housekeeping things. In our zoom webinar you can see and hear the speakers but they cannot see or hear you. They can see you are here though and you can see an account of your fellow vikings at the top of your screen. Theres a couple of functions we will be using throughout the event you can find at the bottom of your zoom window. One of an icon label chat. Youre welcome to post your comments and thoughts in the chat. Thats a great way to show your appreciation for the author and interact with your fellow attendees. If you have a specific question you would like to have answered by the author, please post that in the q a module. You can find by clicking on the icon labeled q a. We will be polling questions only from the q a to be answered in the later part of the program. We are recording tonight event so look for video or audio versions on our social channels later on. And importantly, tonight featured book, a good time to be born, is available for sale from greenlight bookstore. We are excited build offer actual shopping our bookstore locations noon to 7 p. M. Every day of the week, and you can purchase this book and many others onsite, or order online at greenlight bookstore. Com for a quick pick up at the store or for shipping anywhere in the u. S. If you care about supporting the careers of authors and the ongoing assistance of independent bookstores, tonight featured book is a great way to show your support. And now to introduce to nights speakers. Our interview tonight is andrew solomon. He is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psycholog psychology. A professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia UniversityMedical Center and the former president of pen america. Most recently he made an audio series called new family values, and awardwinning film. His books received National Book critics circle award for nonfiction, along with 25 other national and international awards. He is also the author of and National Book award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. The irony tower and a novel. An activist and lgbtq writes, mental health, education and the arts, and who is a founder Solomon Research Fellowship and lgbtq studies at yale universities and serves on the board of the national Lgbtq Task ForceCome University of michigan and metropolitan museum of arts come in your Public Library and many others. Andrew would be speaking with our featured author, perri klass. She is a a professor of journam and pediatrics at new york university, codirector of nyu florence and National Medical director of reach out and read. She writes a weekly column the checkup for the new york times. Her new book, a good time to be born, is about the fight against Child Mortality transform ferreting come doctrine and the way we live. In weaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, she pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like rebecca, mary putnam and josephine baker, and to the nurses Public Health advocates and scientists who brought new approaches and ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. She is going to start off with a reading from the book and then shell be talking with andrew and with all of you. Perri, please take it away. Thank you. Our grandparents and great grandparents and all the parents before throughout history expected that children would die. Die. It was a known and predictable risk that went along with being a parent. Now we expect children not to die. We are the luckiest bears in history, we who are part of this wave coming over the past 75 yr so, because we are the first parent ever who have been able to enter into parenthood in the hopeful expectation of seeing all our children survive and thrive. And we are also the luckiest children in history, or into an era when we could expect to grow up, along with all our sisters and brothers. Driving down Child Mortality in the late 19th and early 20th century was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment, maybe even our greatest human accomplishment, at least for pediatricians and parents. The entire world house we learned with some shock and great sorrow how vulnerable our precious human bodies are to the microorganisms that find ways to take advantage of how we live, what we eat, how we travel. Parents have taken some comfort in knowing that, for the most part, children have been less severely affected by covid19, but all through Human History, babies and children have been a particularly vulnerable group, and parents have lived the fear of contagion, infection, and death. Children used to die regularly and unsurprisingly. Babies died at birth or soon after because they were premature or just week, because they were born with congenital anomalies, because i got infections, older infants and oneyearold died this summer diarrhea often caused by microbes in the water or in the cows milk they had started drinking after they been weaned. Three year old and for your old guy dip scarlet fever and diphtheria and pneumonia and measles, of Skin Infections that turned into sepsis or influenza that turned into pneumonia. As recently as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, almost every family in every ethnic group and every country, rich or poor, was touched in some way by the deaths of children. Childhood death was always there in the shadows at the edge of the family landscape, in prayers and religious ceremonies, in the memorial portraits hanging on the wall, and popular sentimental poems and stories and dramas and paintings. Because they figured so consistently in childhood and family life, child deaths also figured in the art and literature and songs and stories of childhood and family life from a century ago, as they had all through Human History. I am a lover of babies and yet i cant seem to have been, wrote mrs. Wds from brooklyn in 1970. I married 11 years last july and would have six children and about to become a mother again which almost fear, i have now that two out of six. Two of them apparently died some years ago, she didnt say how, but then with any year she had two babies and ended up losing both of them. I gave birth to a beautiful fat boy and it lived about three days. The doctor told her that they behead a leaking heart. Three months later she was pregnant again, this son was live to be your own and then she awoke one morning and an event alongside of me. Now pregnant again, she worried constantly both about the terrible long labor is likely to endure and about what would become of the baby. I try to live a good honest life and my home is my habit and babies are my idols. I love them but im afraid something will happen to this one again. She was writing this letter to the United States government come to the Childrens Bureau established in 1912. This new federal office has published a pamphlet a needle care and infant care in 1913 and 1914, immediately and to drink with popular. They were at first distributed free of charge and provided by politicians to their constituents later available for purchase. By 1929 the government estimated these writings had touched parents of half the babies born in the United States. You can think how i feel, she wrote to the author of the pamphlets. I cried night and day for my big fat baby taken from me like that. Mrs. W. D. Is not living in the middle ages or even in the thick point here. She lived in 1917 when my grandmother lived and in your city where my grandmother lived ten years before my own parents were born. At that time in 1970 when mrs. W. D. Rotor letter, nearly a quarter of the children were not a life in the United States, died before the fifth birthdays. Those mothers wrote in the early decades of the 20th century with a certain hope for medical solutions for advice that my protect the next baby, even with a desire to extend that protection to all babies and children to join in the larger project the Childrens Bureau representative i only wish i could take up the work of promoting big welfare, wrote a woman had lost her child in illinois. Some of the letters were from women who struggle with written language and spelling, other semieducated and the privileged. There was no segment of society in which childrens lives were secure, no have there ever been. Though statistical evidence is incomplete, infant and Child Mortality in both europe and america was extremely high through the 17th and early 18th centuries with the third of all children or in some cases even 40 or more dying before the outgrew childhood. In the first decade of the 20th century when my grandmother was going up, out of every 1000 live births in the United States, more than 100 babies did not live to the first birthdays and mortality rates were even higher among the rural poor, immigrants and africanamericans. By comparison the infant mortality rate for the United States in 2017 was 5. 8 deaths per 1000 live births if the majority of these deaths before the first birthday actually occurs in first months of life and most are due either to congenital anomalies, serious birth defects, or to prematurity. A good time to be born tells the story of one of our greatest human achievements, remarkable fusion of science and Public Health and medicine, that transformed our families, i notional landscapes and even our souls. All through Human History many babies died at birth and many children died in infancy and childhood. This was true through the middle ages and the renaissance, two in colonial america and in victorian england and of still true in the early 20th centuries. If you went around any cable pretty much everyone wouldve lost the sibling in childhood, lost a friend to death at a young age or lost a child. Infant and child were told it was a fact for almost every family, rich or poor. John john d. Rockefeller, the rt man in the world, founded the Rockefeller Institute when his grandson died at scarlet fever. So mortality was higher among 19th century disadvantaged populations including enslaved children and urban immigrant poor. I will stop there. Thank you for that lovely reading. Let me begin this conversation by saying this is really quite a remarkable book. It just had a rave review in the times. It was written in an engaging and even enthralling style. It takes a long would takes a long what you just heard is how fluid period is over it in a was not so relatively aspect information likewise details, anecdotes and stories like the story that of mrs. W. D. But many other stories. Those are the people who lost children, ranging across the entire social spectrum and the people who figured out how to save children bit by bit and overtime. Its a very sobering study, and a parent as well i was struck over and over again by what mustve been like to have to perform a more conditional attack on your children. I thought it looked forward to many of the questions helicopter parenting and so on that our current at the moment. I wanted to ask you, what is your sense of how people responded psychologically and emotionally to these losses . Do you think because theyre a Common People were better protected against them or do you think the quality of their despair was a same as the quality of despair in someone who loses a child to sids which write about in the book today . I think the quality of despair was the same but in a strange way they were less isolated. Because it was so, because was discussed, because it was an experience by doing had had. I dont think i think when you read the accounts that parents right, you can see they love their children just as much and in the same ways, you can see the room members you can see the with over and over the question of could i had come if we didnt move to the city, if i hadnt done this, if you hadnt done that. They did all of that but they did sort of encompass. One of the things which struck me is that when i talked to people of lost children in recent years, because of course the world is that it perfectly safe place and tragedies happen, many of those parents talk about how isolate the field, that you cannot bring up casually or not so casually in conversation nowadays, we have three children but only two of them are living. That stops the conversation. Thats not something that can easily be discussed. And i think in the past there were ways because if so, that you could at least acknowledges the child and acknowledge the grief. Talk a little bit in that context about some of the losses where the emotion clearly cut so deep and with the quality of accusation cuts a deeper i taking particularly of Eugene Oneills oneill mother and the story you tell about the death of his will wouldve been his oldest brothe brother. I was actually writing about people and is looking for examples in our literature of measles. Measles was a disease that every single child got before there was a vexing cousin it was incredibly infectious disease, and most, its a fairly miserable disease. Children have high fevers and feel terrible but most of them recover. But in a disease which hits every single child when the relatively rare complications, if the relatively rare complication times all the children in the world so you lose a fair number of children. Even so when i looked for references, but many of them were complicated because its a disease we get expats. Most children recover. Then i was watching a performance of long days journey, a play so strongly autobiographical in which we think of as a play about addiction, the mother is addicted to opiates and the father and the sons drink too much. At the center of the plate is this tragedy of a baby lost. A mother who went away to be on the road with her actor husband and she leaves with her own mother her sixyearold son and her baby. The centuryold gets measles, you know, the older child gets measles and he goes into the room where the baby is and the baby gets measles. The child recovers. The baby died and the mother never forgive yourself for having left their children and she never forgives the son who went into the room and infected his younger brother and she thinks he did on purpose because he was jealous of the baby. That common childhood disease basically comes into this family and devastates the family. Right. And it was all true. Eugene oneills mother, the child or whatever, hes sort of reconciliation baby born later timorleste take the place of the boy who died. Talk a little bit, i think all of us know that there was enormous medical progress and that the development of vaccine has made an extremely different in the lives of children. But the Public Health story is less well known. How was the information that only by getting vaccines but also about other measures that were helpful to children, how was it disseminated and who was the visionaries led that process . I feel a little guilty here im going to be able to Public Health but if you are probably heroic names in sanitation that i probably dont know because im looking at this from the medical side. You start by going back certainly to the 19th century and thinking about the cds building sewer systems and cleaning up the water. Thats tremendously important. But when you get towards when the things happening in the 19th century people are figuring out the importance of microbes. The importance of bacteria and you have has to doing his experience and later developing this technique pasteurization which can make milk safe for all that is tremendously important but just as you say it has to get to the individual household. Parents have to understand the dangers of letting milk spoiled, using water that you dont know whether it is pure. One of the reasons thats important is because especially in somers, especially in cities around the turnofthecentury theres this understanding that in some become something they call call the roof in phantom. Its not really call her. If shes upset stomach, diarrhea. Call. It kills every babies every month in the summer. Theres not a full understanding either on the part of parents or on the part of the medical people where that comes from. Is it feeding babies of all food . Is it the heat . Is it bad smells, poor ventilation . What it is is its the whole range of microbes that cause children get stomach upset and then its the fact babies are so vulnerable to dehydration. Its still true. If youve ever brought a sick baby with a stomach bug and come your pediatrician probably told you the infectious not going to do any harm, its a dehydration. You have to go out and buy dehydration solution, popsicles, keep putting the fluids back in. Yes, absolutely. And then talk about a subject i think hasnt received perhaps to the extent should of what was relationship between the people who develop vaccines and help to control or at least address the many of these problems and early stirrings of the Eugenics Movement and the notion where these children and it was unworthy children who were dyin such large numbers. Thats a good interesting question because right around the beginning of the 19th century, beginning of the 20 century, people start counting dead babies. The truth is if you go back much further than that, early infant mortality, children dont make it out of the delivery room, stillborn babies, are such a common fact of life that nobody even necessarily really counts. At the beginning of the 20 century, 1906, a british a british doctor publishes book called infant mortality a social problem in which he basically says we should not be losing all of these children under a year of age in the united kingdom. Were losing a a regiment a sml beings. But he says some children are just going to be born week and is nothing we can do about that. That is to say, he thinks probably want out of every ten mages lose because they are sort of the