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

Good evening and welcome to the live author event. Iam from greenlight and we are thrilled to host tonights event with perri klass and the new book a good time to be born. And before we start i want to say a huge thanks to the team at norton for making this happen. And with the theaters are still here. We are grateful for your support and thank you for your connection. Now just a couple of housekeeping things you can see and hear the speakers but they cannot see or hear you. And those at the bottom of your window. And youre welcome to post your comments in the chat. And then to interact with fellow attendees. Please post that on the module and with the q a. And we are recording tonights event and it will be on the channel later on. And then we encourage you to shop at the actual location new and through 7 00 oclock p. M. And many others onsite. And the green light bookstore. Com or for shipping anywhere in the us. If you care about supporting authors and independent bookstores tonights featured book is a great way to show your support. And now to introduce to your speaker Andrew Solomon is our interviewer a writer and lecture on politics and culture and psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and former president of an america. Most recently an audio series far from the tree would be the National Book credit circle award for nonfiction along with 25 other national and International Awards also the author of a National Book award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. And activist education and the arts and the founder of solomon Research Studies at Yale University and serves on the board of the national lgbtq Depression Center and metropolitan the New York Public Library and many others. And speaking with our future on our future author a professor of pediatrics the National Medical director and rates the weeks, and the new york times. And her book a good time to be born is about Child Mortality transforming parenting and the way we live and leading her own experience that pays tribute to other authors and the National Scientist who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about vaccination to families. And perri klass will start us off with a reading from the boo book. Please take it away. Thank you. To grandparents and great grandparents and all the parents before who expect to their children would die. Is a noticeable risk and now we expect children not to die. We are the luckiest parents in history over the past 75 years or so because were the first parents ever to enter into parenthood with those awful expectations to see children survive and thrive. And then expect to go all of her sisters and brothers. Driving down Child Mortality in the 20th century was a single project but it can be seen as unified accomplishment the greatest human accomplishment. The entire world has learned was shock and sorrow how vulnerable the precious human bodies are to the microorganisms take advantage of how we live or eat or travel and to take some comfort to know for the most part to be affected through covid19 but then a particular group with a fear of contagion and death. Children used to dive regularly and unsurprisingly because they were premature or born with a congenital anomaly one died of diarrhea and then started drinking. Three and four yearolds and five and seven and eight yearolds the word dive from fever and Skin Infections or influenza turning into pneumonia. As recently as the early 20th century almost every family with every ethnic group which sure was touched in some way by the death of children childhood death was at the edge of the family landscape impairs in religious ceremonies hanging on the wall because it is so consistently in childhood and family life all in the art and literature as they all have through human history. I want babies but i cannot seem to have them. Married 11 years last july and six children and about to become a mother again now two out of six to the died some years ago within one year she had two babies. I gave birth to a beautiful fat boy that lived for three days. The doctor said he had a leaking heart three months later she was pregnant again and it looked to be one year old and then found him dead. Now pregnant again she worries constantly of the terrible long labor she wouldnt do her and what would become of the baby. I try to live a good honest life and babies of my idols. But im afraid something will happen to this one again. She was ready mr. United States Government to the Childrens Bureau established 1912 to publish the pamphlets prenatal care and infant care in 1914. They were first distributed free of charge and provided by politicians and then available for purchase. By 1929 the government estimated half the babies born of the United States you can think of how i felt. I cried night and day for my big fat baby taken for me like that. She was out living in the middle ages or the Victorian Era but 1917 when my grandmother lived and in new york city where my grandmother lived ten years with my own parents were born. At that time when she wrote this letter nearly one quarter of the children born to live in the United States died before the birthday. And then with a certain hope for a medical solution or advice to protect the next baby even with the desire to extend that to all babies and children to join in the larger Childrens Bureau. I only wish i could take up the work of promoting baby welfare who lost her child in illinois summer from women in those to be educated in the privileged nor had there ever been from a statistical evidence concerning Child Mortality what was extremely high and a third of all children died before the hour grew childhood. My grandmother was growing up and with a live birth in the United States and then mortality rates were even higher. The mortality rate was five. Eight for every 1000 live births actually it occurred with those congenital anomalies and serious defects. And with the greatest human achievement with Public Health to transform our families that emotional landscape that many babies died in birth this is true to the middle ages through colonial america and true in the early 20th century pretty much everyone would have infant and Child Mortality for everyone rich or poor and John D Rockefeller founded the rockefeller institute. Mortality was higher among 19th century including enslaved children. I will stop there. Thank you for that lovely reading. Let me begin the conversation by saying thats a Remarkable Book it is written in and engaging style and what you just heard to bring togetr abstract information. But like why is anecdotes but many other stories those who losthildren and across the entire spectrum and those who tried to save children over time and it is a sobering study and as a parent myself over and over agaithinking what it must of felt like and i lo forward to many of the questions that are current at theoment but what is your consensus how people responded psychologically and emionally . Becaus better one people are better protected . Or someone who loses a child . I think quality was but in a strange way they were less isolated. Because it was discussed. I dont think so i think when you read the accounts they love their children just as much. They remember them and you can see they even went over the question of if we had moved to the city. If i havent done that or you didnt do that it was all of that but one of the things that struck me is when i talk to people who lost children in recent years and tragedies happen many talk about how isolated they to come up so casually we have three children but only two of them are living. That stops the conversation that is not something that can easily be discussed or at least to acknowledge the child and acknowledge the grief. So in that context where it can cut so deep that quality of accusatn and particularly with the mother and the story that you tell of what would have been his older brother. I was actually writing about measles and looking for an example and it is a disease every single child got. Incredibly infectious. It is a fairly miserable diseas disease. They feel terrible that most of them recover but doesnt hit every single child when there are complications for all the children in the world. Even so looking for these references and most children recover but in watching a performance that is strongly autobiographical that what we think of and then to be addicted to opiates and at the center the tragedy of a baby lost to measles and mother who leaves with her own mother and her sexual son and her baby in the sexual gets measles and then goes into the room with the baby and the baby gets measles the child recovers in the baby dies and she never forgives herself for leaving the children and never forgives the son who went into the room and infected the younger brother and things he did on purpose because he was jealous of the baby. That common childhood disease basically comes into this family and devastates the family. He is the reconciliation baby born later more or less to take the place of the one who died. And there was enormous medical progress to make an extraordinary difference in the lives of children. How is that information to helpful to children and he will the visionaries who led that process of dissemination . But then there are probably heroic things that i probably dont know. And those to clean up the water and one of the things that is happening that people are figuring out and all that tremendous importance. And then you have to understand the dangers if you dont know if the water is pure. That in the summer calm something colorado its really just upset stomach and diarrhea but it kills thousands of babies every month in the summer there is not a full understanding and where that comes from. Is at the heat or poor ventilation . The whole range of microbes that causes children with then the babies are so vulnerable to dehydration. If you ever have a baby with a stomach bug the pediatrician told you infection will not do harm its the dehydration. By the solution and keep putting the fluids back in. Absolutely. So what was the relationship between the people who develop vaccines and to help to control these problems and the notion they have were the children who were dying in such large number numbers . Thats a really interesting question because around the beginning of the 19th or the 20h century people start counting dead babies and the truth is early infant mortality is such a common fact of life and then at the beginning of the 20th century to publish a book called infant mortality in which he basically says we should not be losing all of these children and the united kingdom. We are losing a record amount. And then to say one out of every ten may just lose because they are the unfit. That the people that are trying to bring down infant mortality and are regularly being asked about saving the week babies what will happen . Arent today meant to diet . Are they able to live . There are quite of few, the founder of the american pediatrics was a very weak and sickly baby himself when he was born in germany and he repeated the references the fact that just because it doesnt predict who that person will grow up to be but there are other people with the Eugenics Movement in which people are explaining seriously at the same time that you have to discourage certain people from marrying or reproducing because they are very worried about people with epilepsy for example or whatever people are on their list. Everybody who is involved bringing down infant mortality but a question that keeps being addressed. Will we actually weaken our population . On the other hand its also very clear to everybody, even the people at the top of the social pyramid andosing babies frequently. Talk about abraham and mary todd linln and the loss of their baby and that extraordary way they responded the spontaneity of losing a child like jefferson davis. The lincolns had four sons and they lose one as a child. By theime they get to the white house they have two relatively small boys and one of the things that is interesting there are always a good Human Interest story to have two boys in the white house. Robert is already in college. And they get sick during the civil war. They get typhoid probably because washington with the soldiers in the camps inhe sanitation is overwhelmed. And there is sewage in the potomac and a drink the water in the white house. One of them dies. And one of the reasons i like talking about president ial children its a shorthand way to say with the bestedical attention anyone could provide at the time. And then the child who dies in the white house but Mary Todd Lincoln is to war excessively inconsolable and in that era shes not able to accept it for something that has been determined. Although both parents are deeply deeply affected by losing their son, theres something about the way she mourns. She doesnt want to save or ever go into the room where he died again. And then eventlly, she did have a tragic life and her husband is assassinated. She had four sons the third white house boy died probably of tubercusis not that long after his father so she buries three of her four children and the parallelwe were talking about is the Confederate White House with jefferson davis. She also outlived all four of her sons. She got one daughter who outlived her and as an adult. But this tragic history it is a recurring trage. This all happens when parts all over the country are moving, especially sons going into the army. And move forward in a way obviously in the midst oa Global Pandemic and the sense of mortality and was some measure that it hasnt in many generations in a shockg and overwhelming fashion. But yet we find ourselves in a country according to where one quarter of the people interviewed word not be vaccinated if the vaccine were developed. Tell me about the politics and how they grew up. The we this which was such a terrifying word, or a disease like polio and how quickly they ripped from our collective memory and so it helped me understand a little why people are not more frightened of the diseases and therefore why they are sometimes susceptible to worrying about the vaccine. I mean, theres certainly a long history of anxiety going back all the way to the no questionquestion scientific mirf smallpox vaccines, but people worried about it and understood vaccines are this clever thing. They turn on your immune system. I give you a dose of something that isnt smallpox but something close enough that it triggers your body into defending itself against smallpox. For some people that was clever. Isnt Science Smart and for some people it translates as you are giving me an infection. That you are putting something into my body. And i think that is sort of a biological brilliance sometimes also it feels frightening. When you look at the diseases and when you think about polio and what tetanus was when it was around. Theres no question. My parents who grew up in new york city and there were polio epidemics every summer and they grew up with the best form of social distancing and which parents were trying to keep their children away from others because there was a virus out there that could cripple you or kill you. And i think that its hard to remember that if youavent lived with it. I think it is very hd to remember it. One of thehings that is so distinguished in this book is th its a vivid portrait of the people that helped. D i feel that there are convsations so far that have been about cldren, which is kind of a downbeat topic. And the book is in many ways about the lives of children and the lives that made the survival of children possible. Im going to switch to a more upbeat pce of the conversation and i thought i would start by asking you to give a description of the life and activity of the woman i think of now as your josephine baker, not to be confed, who is so extrrdinary and looks masculinand th in the theory thu ovide but tell us about what was involved for a womanf her era in becoming a dtor and what she was able to accomplish in part being a woman is a doctor. I found myself identified at least aspiring to identify with some of these remarkable women and with their stories, josephine wrote a wonderful autobiography called fighting for life and you hear her voice so clearly as she describes she was from a good middleclass family and wanted to have a career but these things happen. She needed a job and went to one of the womens medical colleges and practiced medicine and was a very determined, very confident, but at a certain point she fell in love with the idea of Public Health and started working for the department of health and she was going to house to house and was working in the school. She became interested in the question of preventing diseases, because you couldnt treat the children. There really wasnt anything you could do, and she told me when we were looking for the example of the way she wrote about it. The way to deal with people being sick. And then if you could teach parents coming back to what we were talking about before, how to provide and keep the milk safe and boil water and breastfeed babies, that you could keep the children from getting sick. She wrote about in experiment one the summer proving that he didnt necessarily kill. She was one of the first people to help get nurses into the Public Schools and any of these common things in the classrooms. They were empty because they inspected the children and sent them home. You have won a City Department sending the Children Home because they have an infection, then youve got to the troops coming around and yelling because the children ar