Transcripts For CSPAN2 Perri Klass A Good Time To Be Born 20

CSPAN2 Perri Klass A Good Time To Be Born July 11, 2024

Time to be born how science and Public Health gave children a future. She will be talking with Andrew Solomon so youre in for an excellent time. Before we start i just want to say a huge thanks to perri klass, Andrew Solomon, and the team at noon for making this happen, and to all of you for showing up. Though we are not able to host events in our 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 a couple of housekeeping things. In our resume webinar tonight you can see and hear the speakers but they cannot see or hear you. They can see you are here and you can see a count of your fellow jews at the top of your resume screen. Theres a a couple of functions will be using throughout the event you can find at the bottom of your zoom window. One icon labeled chat with one speech bubble. 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 that looks like two speech bubbles. We will be polling questions only from the q a to be answered in the later part of the program. We are recording two nights event so you can see video versions honor channel later on. Important to come tonight featured book, a good time to be born, is available for sale from greenlight bookstore. We are excited to be able to offer actual shopping at a bookstore location noon to 7 p. M. Every day of the week, and you can purchase this book and many others onsite, or order online debt greenlightbookstore. Com for a quick pick up at the store or for shipping anywhere in the u. S. You care about supporting the careers of authors in the ongoing existence of independent bookstores, find two nights featured book is a great way to show your support. And now to introduce tonight speakers. Our interview tonight is Andrew Solomon, he is a a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology, a professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and the former president of pen america. Most recently he made an audio series called new family values, an awardwinning film. His books received the National Books critics circle award for nonfiction, along with other 25 national and international awards. He is also the author of far and away, a National Book award winner and elusive prize finalist. The irony tower, and a novel. An activist and lgbtq rights mental health, education and arts, and as a fan of the Solid Research fellowship in lgbtq studies at Yale University and serves on the board of the national lgbtq task force, University Michigan depression center, metropolitan museum of arts, new york public library, in many others. Andrew will be speaking with our featured author, perri klass. She is a professor of journalism and pediatrics at new york university, codirector nyu florence, and National Medical director of reach out and read. She writes the 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 that transforms parenting, doctoring and the way we live. Into weaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, she pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like rebecca, mary putnam, and josephine baker, enter the nurses nurses, Public Health advocates and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific 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 here. Thank you. Our grandparents and great grandparents and all the parents before throughout history expected that children would die. It was unknown and predictable risk that went along with being a parent. Now we expect children not to die. We are the lucky spirit in history we, who are part of this wave over the past 75 years or so, because we are the first parents ever been able to enter into parenthood is 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 they can be seen as a unified human accomplishment, maybe even our greatest human accomplishment, at least for pediatricians and parents. The entire world has relearned 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 come 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 with 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 they got infections. Older infants and oneyearold died of summer diarrhea, often caused by microbes in the water or in the cows milk fed they sd drinking after they had been weaned. Three old and fouryearolds and five and six and seven and eight year olds died of scarlet fever and diphtheria and pneumonia in measles, Skin Infections that turn into sepsis for influenza that turned into pneumonia. As recently as a 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 death of children. Childhood of death was always up 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 in paintings. Because if he could so consistently in child and family life, child deaths also figured in art and literature and songs and stories of childhood and family life, a century ago, as they had all through Human History. I am a love of babies and yet i cant seem to have been, wrote mrs. W. D. From berkeley in 1917. I am married 11 years last july and would have six children and about to become a mother again which i almost fear. Two of them died several years ago but within your shed to babies and it up losing both of them. I gave birth to a beautiful batboy and it lived but three days. The doctor told her the baby had a leaking heart. Three months later she was pregnant again. His son live to be a yearold and then she awoke one morning and found him dead alongside me. Now pregnant again she would constantly both about the terrible loans labor she was likely to endure and about what would become of the baby. I try and do a good honest life and my home is my heaven 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, to the Childrens Bureau established in 1912. This new federal office had published the pamphlets prenatal care and infant care in 1913 in 1914. Immediately enduringly popular favorite First District free of charge and provided by politicians to their constituents, later available for purchase. By 1929 the government estimated these writings had touched the parents of half the babies born in the United States. You can think how i feel, mrs. W. D. Wrote the author of the pamphlets. I cry night and day for my big fat baby taken from me like that. Mrs. W. D. Was not living in the middle ages or even in the Victorian Era pictures and 1917, when my grandmother lived, and in new york city when my grandmother lived, ten years before my own parents were born. At that time in 1917 when mrs. W. D. Wrote a letter, get a court of the children were not a life in the United States died the for the fifth birthday. Mothers with an early decades of the 20th century with a certain hope for medical solutions for advice that might protect the next baby, even with the desire to extend protection to all babies and children to join in a larger project the Childrens Bureau and its pamphlets represent only wish i could take up the work of promoting paid welfare, wrote a woman had lost her child in illinois. Some of the letters were from women who struggled with language and stomach and other some educated and privilege. There was no segment of society in which childrens lives were secure nor has there ever been. Though the statistical evidence is incomplete, infant mortality both american europe was extreme high with a third of all children were in some cases even 40 or more dying for the outcome of childhood. In the first decade of the 20th century when my grandmother was growing up, out of every 1000 live births in the tree become more than 100 babies did not live to the first birthday and mortality rates were even higher among the rural poor, immigrants and africanamericans. By comparison to the mortality rate for the United States in 2017 was 5. 8 deaths per thousand live births, the majority with the first birthday actually occurred in the first months of life and most are due either to congenital anomalies come serious birth defects or two prematurity. A good time to be born tells the story of one of our greatest human achievements, remarkable fusion of science and Public Health of medicine, that transform our families, our emotional landscape and even our souls. All through Human History many babies died at birth and many children died in infancy and childhood. This was true to the middle ages and the renaissance, true to ie america and in victorian england and is still true in the early 20th century. If you win direct any table pretty much anyone wouldve lost the silly in childhood, lost a friend to death. Infant and Child Mortality was a fact of life for almost every family, rich or poor. John d rockefeller, the richest man in the world that is a Rockefeller Institute when his grandson died of scarlet fever. The mortality was higher among 19th century disappears dissidee population include slave children and urban immigrant poor. I will stop there. Thank you f that lovely reading. Let me begin this conversation by saying that this is reall quite a remarkable book. It has a rave review in the times. It was written in an engaging and even enthralling style. Ticks alo which a juicer is how fluid areasnd bring together a nose amounts of relatively abstract information. Likewise it details anecdotes and stories like t story that of mrs. W. D. , but many other stories. Those ofhe people who lost children, ranging across the entire socia spectrum, and the people who figured out how to save chiren bit by b and over overtime. Its a very sobering study, and a parent might will as a parent as well i was struck over and over what mustve been likeo have two before the more conditional attack mode under chile. I thought it looked forward to many o the questions helicopte parenting and so on tt our current at theoment. I wanted to ask you, harry, what is your sense of how people responded psychogically and emotionally to these losses . Do you think because they were, people were bter protected against them or do you think the quality of the despair was the same as the quality of despair in someone loses a cld, for example, to sids 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 isolated. Because it was so common because it was discussed because was an experience everyone had had, i dont think i think we do read the accounts that parents right income you can see they love the children just as much in the same way street you can see they remembered then pick you can see the evil over and over the question of, could i have, if we had moved to the city, if i hadnt done this, if you hadnt done that. They did all of that but they did sort of in company. 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 us parents talk about how isolated the field, that you cannot bring up casually or not some cash and conversation nowadays, we have three children but only two of them are living. That stops the conversation. Thats not something that is easily discuss. In the past there were ways because it was so common that you could at least acknowledge the child a acknowledge the grief. Talk a little of it in that context about some of the losses where the emotion clearly cuts a deep and with that part accusation cuts so deep. Im thinking particularly of Eugene Oneills mother and the store you tell about the death of what would eventually his older brother. You know, i was actually writing about people and i was looking for examples in art and literature of measles. Measles was a disease that every single child got before the was a vaccine because it was an incredibly infectious disease, and its a fairly miserable disease. Children have high fevers, they feel terrible most of them recover. But it is a disease which hits every single child when there are relatively rare complications, its a relatively rare complication times all the children in the world. So you lose a fair number of children. Even so, when it looked for measles references, many of them, you know, a disease we get big spots, and most children recover. And then i was watching the performance of long days journey with the genes on your plate which is 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 play is this tragedy of the baby lost to measles. 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 sixyearold gets measles or, the older child gets measles and he goes into the ring with the baby is in the baby gets measles. The child recovers. The baby died in the mother never forget the self or having left the children, and she never forgives the sun to win into the room and infected his younger brother, she thinks he did it on purpose because he was jealous of the baby. That common childhood disease basically comes into this family and devastates the family. Right. Nd it was all true. It was Eugene Oneills mother was, the child would, he is the sort of reconciliation baby born later to more or less 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 extraordinary difference in the lives of children. But the Public Health store is less well known. How was the information that only about getting vaccines but also of the measures that were helpful to children, how was it disseminated and two with the visionaries who really let that process . I feel a little guilty. Im going to be able to do Public Health that i feel there 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 comfortably to the 19th century inking about building come sewer systems and cleaning up their water. Thats tremendously important. But then when you get one of the things happening in the 19th century is people are figuring out the importance of microbes, the importance of bacteria. You have experiment and later developing this technique pasteurization which can make milk safe, all that is to missing board, but just as you say, it has to get to the individual household. Parents have to understand the dangers of letting milk spoil, using water that you dont know whether it is pure. One of the recent that is important is because especially in summers especially in the citys around the turn of the century theres this understand than the summer comes something that they call call the root infanta. Its not really call the room. Its just diarrhea. It kills thousands of babies every month in the summer cholera. Theres not another stent either on the part of parent or medical people where that comes from. Is it feeding babies raw food . Is it the heat . Is it bad spells . Is a poor ventilation . What it is is its a whole range of microbes that causes children to get stomach upset and then its the fact that babies are so vulnerable to dehydration. Its still true. If you ever brought a sick baby with a stomach bug in, your pediatrician probably told you the infection is not going to do any harm, its a dehydration. You have to go out and buy rehydration solution, you have to buy popsicles, keep putting the fluids back in. Yes, absolutely. And then talk about a subject i think hasnt received wraps to the extent it should have, what was the relationship between the people who develop vaccines and help to control or at least address some of these problems, and the early sterling of Eugenics Movement and the notion that somehow were the children lived and it was unworthy children who were dying in such large numbers. So thats a really interesting question, because right around the beginning of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century, people start counting dead babies. The truth is if you go back much further than that, early infant mortality, children who dont make it out of the delivery room, stillborn babies, babies who dont breeze, are such a common fact life the nobody even necessarily really counts. At the beginning of the 20th century, 1906, six

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