For we start i just want to say a huge thanks to perri, andrew and the team at norton for making this happen and all of you for showing up. So were not able to host eventsin our store spaces , Community Authors and readers. Were thankful for your support andfor the chance to make the space for conversation and connection. Now just a couple of housekeeping things. In our dual webinar tonight you can see and hear the speakers. They cannot see or hearyou. You can see a count of the top of yourscreen. Theres a couple of functions youll be using throughoutthe event. You can find at the bottom of your resume and down, theres an event labeled chat. Youre welcome to post your thoughts in the chat. Its a great way to show your appreciation for the author and interact with yourfellow attendees. If you have specific questions that cant be answered by the author please come to the q and a module and click on the icon labeled q and they that looks like two speech bubbles. Well be pulling questions only from the q and a to be answered in the laterpart of the program. We are recording tonights event for video or audio versions on our social channels lateron. And importantly, tonights featured book a good time to be born how science and Public Health gave children a future is available or sale from Greenlight Bookstore and we can offer actual shopping at our bookstore locations noon to 7 pm every day of the week and you can purchase perris book and many others on site or order online at Greenlight Bookstore. Com for a quick pick up at the store or shipping anywhere in the us. If you care about supporting authors and the ongoing existence ofindependent bookstores , find a nice featured book isa great way to show your support. And now to introduce tonights speaker. Our interviewer tonight is andrew solomon. He is a writer and procurer on politics, culture and psychology, a professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia UniversityMedical Center and former president of penn america. Most recently he made an audio series called a new family values far from the tree. It received a bad National BookCritics Award for nonfiction , with 24 other international awards. Hes also the author of four and delay, the National Book award winner and pulitzer prize. Ivory tower and a novel, an activist in lgbt rights she helps education and the arts and the founder of the Research Fellowship for lgbt studies and serves on the board of the national Lgbtq Task Force michigancenter, metropolitan museum of art and New York Public Library and many others. Andrew will be speaking with our featured author, perri klass. Shes a professor of journalism and pediatrics at new york university, codirector of the nyu forum and the nationalmedical director of reach out in the. She writes the lead column in the checkup for the new york times. Her new book a good time to be born is about the fight for Child Mortality that transform suffering and the way we live. Interweaving her own experience as a medical student and doctor , based on women doctors like Rebecca Coulter and Josephine Baker and Public Health scientists who brought new approaches for ideas of sanitation. Perri will start us off the reading from the book and she will talk with all ofyou. Perri, please take it away. Our grandparents and great grandparents, our parents expected childrens to die. It was a risk that went along with eating a parent. Now we expect children not to die. We are the luckiestparents in history , we who are part of this wave over the past 75 years or so because we are the first parents ever who have been able to enter into parenthood with that hopeful expectation of seeing all our children survive and thrive. And also are the luckiest children in history into an era week where we can expect to grow up with all our sisters and brothers, driving down Child Mortality at rates not seen in the 20th century was in no way a singlesubject but it can be seen as a unified accomplishment , maybe even our greatest human accomplishment. At least for pediatricians and therapists. The entire world has relearned with grace our sorrow how vulnerable are purchased human bodies are and find ways to take advantage of how we travel, parents have taken comfort in knowing that most of our children have been left to be affected by covid19 in Human History babies and children were particularly vulnerable groups, a parents who lived with a fear of contagion, infection and death. Children used to die regularly and unsurprisingly. Babies died because they were premature or just weak, because they were born with congenital anomalies,because they infections. One year olds died of diarrhea often caused by microbes in the water or the milk that they started drinking after they had been weeding. Threeyearolds and fouryearolds and five, six and seven and eightyearold died of seizures and diphtheria and measles, Skin Infections that turned into sepsis or influenza that turned into pneumonia. As recently as the late 19th and earlier 20th century almost every family of every ethnic group and every country rich or poor was touched in some way bythe death of children. While the death was always there in the shadows of the landscape, and prayers and religious ceremonies hanging on the wall. And popular sentimental poems. Because they dont so consistently in childhood and family life, childhood death also figuredin literature and stories of family life , as they had all too human histories. I am a lover of baby and yet i cant seem to have them wrote one researcher from brooklyn, i am married 11 years and was asked to become a mother again which i have now all but two out of six, one boy nine years and 16 years, two of them had apparently died some years ago, he didnt say how and within years she had two babies and ended up losing both of them. I gave birth to a beautiful fat boy and the doctor told her the baby had already seen heart, she was pregnant again and she awoke one morning and found him dead alongside of me. Now pregnant again she lacks is about a long labor she was likely to endure and about what would becomeof the baby. I try to live a good honest life and the babies are my idol, i love them but i am afraid something will happen to this one again. She was writing this letter to the government to the Childrens Bureau established in 1912. This new federal office and published a book on prenatal care and infant care in 1914. Immediately it was enduringly popular but it was first distributed free of charge and provided by politicians to their constituents, are availablefor purchase. By 1929 government estimated these writings and touched half of babies born in the United States. You can think how i feel, mrs. Wc wrote to the author of the pamphlets. I cried night and day for my big fat baby taken from me like that. Mrs. Wb was not living in the middle ages, she was living in 1917 when my grandmother and in new york city where my grandmother lived, 10 years before my own parents were born and at that time in 1970 when mrs. Wb wrote a letter, nearly a quarter of the children born alive in the United States died before their fifthbirthday. What mothers wrote in the early decades was hope for medical solutions, or advice that might protect the next babies. Even with a desire to extend protection to all babies and children to join in the larger project that the childrens project represented. I only wish i could take up the work of promoting babies out there wrote a woman who had lost her child in illinois. Some of the letters were from women who struggled with languages and others educated and privileged. There was no segment of society in which childrens lives were secure nor have there ever been. Statistical evidence had been completed and it was extremely high for the 17th or early 18th century. Third of all children or in some case 40 percent or more dying before they entered childhood. In the first decade of the 20th century when my grandmotherwas growing up , 50,000 live births in the United States , and mortality rates were even higher among the world for immigrants and africanamericans. Was 5. 8 deaths per thousand. The majority of these tests were actually for first months of life and most of their lifes for gentle anomalies, previous first effects orimmaturity. A group tells the story of one of our greatest human achievers, a remarkable Public Health and medicine, transformed our families and our emotional landscapes and even our souls, altered Human History made many babies died at birth and making children die of at least the same childhood, this was through the middle ages and true in colonial america and victorian england and it was still true in the early20th century. If you went around a table, pretty much everyone would have lost a child or had her friend added thatyoung age lost a child. Childhood mortality cost of without a ritual report. John d rockefellerthe richest man in the world , the Rockefeller Institute with scarlet fever, where mortality was higher among the century of disadvantaged populations including children and the urban immigrants. We stopped there. Let me begin the conversation by saying that this is really quite a remarkable book. It just had a rave review in the times. Its written in an engaging and evenenthralling style. It gets along with with you in return, thank you for bringing together at enormous amounts of absent likewise it details anecdotes and stories like the story of mrs. Wb but many other stories all of the people who lost children ranging across the entire social spectrum and thepeople who figured out how to save children. Its a very sobering study. An apparent like myself i was over and over again by to have performed a more conditional attack. And i thought it looked forward to many of the questions of helicopter parenting and so on that are prominent at the moment but what is your sense of how people responded psychologically and emotionally to these losses, do you think that because they were common for better protected against them or do you think the quality of their sustainment was the quality of their and someone loses a child which you write about in the book today. I think the quality of despair was the same but in a strange way they were less because it was so common, because it was an experience everyone had had. Dont think that, i think that when you read these accounts that parents right and can you can see they love their children just as muchin the same ways , they remember them and you can see they went over and over, could i have if we had moved to the city, if i had done this, if you hadnt done that. He did all of that but they did it sort of in company and one of the things which struck me is that when i talked to people who have lost children in recent years because of course the world is not a perfectly safe place and tragedies happen, many of those parents talk about how isolated they feel, that they cannot bring casually or not so casually in conversation we had three children butonly two of them are living. That stopped the conversation, not something that can easily be stopped and i think in the past there were ways because it was so common that you could at least acknowledge the child and acknowledgedthe greek. Talk a little bit in the context about some of the losses where it cut so and where the quality of activation cuts of the. I thinking particularly of Eugene Oneills mother and the story about the death of his what would have been his older brother. I was writing about measles and looking for examples and arts and literature of measles and measles is a disease that every single child got before there was a vaccine because there was this incredibly Infectious Disease and that most its a fairly miserable these so most of them are covered but its a disease which every single child when they are relatively rare permutations, a rare so you lose children. Many of them were safely tied because children recovered and then i was actually watching a performance of long days journey into night which is so strongly autobiographical and which is detailed as a play about a mother is addicted to opiates and the father and the son and the center of the plate is this tragedy of a baby who went away to be on the road with her after her husband and she means with her own mother because shes a sixyearold son and her baby and sixyearold gets measles or and he goes into the room where the baby is and the baby gets measles, the child recovers, the baby dies and the mother never forgets herself for having left the children and she never gives her self who went to the room and infected the other brother. She thinks she did it on purpose because shes jealous of the baby and thats common childhood disease. Acyclic comes into this family and devastates the family. And it was all true. And Eugene Oneills mother was, these the sort of reconciliation baby, born later in more or less taking theplace of the boy who dies. Talk a little bit, all of us know that there was enormous medical progress and that the development of vaccines has made an extraordinary difference in the lives of children. But the Public Health story is not wellknown. How is the information not only about getting vaccines but also that other measure, how was it disseminated and who were the visionaries who let that process . I feel a little guilty. I feel there were probably what names in sanitation that i probably dont know. You start by going back certainly to the 19th century thinking about sewer systems and cleaning up their water. Thats tremendously important but then when you get towards, one of the things thats happening in the 19th century is figuring out the importance of microbes, the importance of bacteria. You are doing these experiments and then developing this technique activation which can make milk safe. All of that is tremendously important to get to the individual households. Parents have to understand the dangers of letting the soil, abusing water if you dont know what you are and one of the reasons thats important is because you discovered especially in the cities allowing his understanding of that in they are proposing something they call cholera, its just diarrhea and its killed thousands of babies every month in the summer. And 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, is it the heat. Is it bad smells, is it for ventilation. What is is is all that whole range of microbes causing children to get some and its the fact that babies are so vulnerable. And its so true, if you ever brought a sick baby with a stomach bug in to pediatricians bubbles and told you the infection is not going to do any harm, you got to go out and buy the hydration solution, youve got to keep putting the fluid back here. And then talk about the subject that i think hasnt received perhaps as much attention as it should have, what was the relationship between the people who develop vaccines and help to control or at least address though many of these problems and the early starting to be Eugenics Movement and the notion that somehow it was on were the children who were dying in such large numbers. Thats a really interesting question the cause right around the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, people start counting dead babies and i think the truth is that if you go back muchfurther than that , infant mortality, stillborn babies, babies who dont breed are such a common fact of life that nobody necessarily even really counted and beginning of the 20thcentury, 1906 , theres a book called infant mortality and the Social Circle in which he basically says we should not be losing children under year of age to this. Where uses losing a regiment of small babies but he says some children are just going to be mortal and theres nothing we can do about that but he thinks the probably one out of every 10 may just lose because theyre sort of unfit area and what, this is one of the things thats really interesting about the movement against this is mortality is that people trying to bring down infant mortality, are regularly being asked what if you save all the weekbabies, whats going to happen. Arent we going to, or payment to die or are they really able to live. There are quite a few babies, a founder of american pediatrics doctor abraham jacoby was a very weak and sickly baby himself. He was born in germany and he repeatedly references the fact that just because somebody is weak and sickly baby doesnt forget who that person isgoing to grow up to be. But there are other people and theres collapse with Eugenics Movement in which you have people claiming very seriously that at the same time as your saving babies, you also have to discourage certain people from marrying or reproducing. The cause theyre very worried about people with epilepsy forexample. Or whatever people are on their list and this is true of everybody was involved in bringing mortality but its a question which seeks being addressed. Will we actually weaken our population if we save these babies. On the other hand, its also very clear to everybody that even the people at the top of thesocial pyramid are losing babies. And losing babies frequently. Talk a little bit about abraham and Mary Todd Lincolns loss of their baby and the very extraordinary way that they responded and the odd simultaneity of their losing a child at the same time that Jefferson Davis did. They lose one as a child probably to diphtheria long before the white house. By the time they get to the white house they had two relatively small boys and one of the things which is good is the present is always interested in white house children, there are always good in Human Interest rate so they hav