Glaude, jr. Good evening and welcome to knights live online author event with greenlight bookstore. I am chelsea from green light and we are thrilled to host to knights event with perri klass presenting her new book a good 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 barry, andrew, and the team at norton for making this happen, and to all of you for showing up. So were not able to events in our store spaces, our community, 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 zoom webinar tonight 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 attendees at the top of your zune screen. Theres a couple of functions we will be using throughout the event you can find at the bottom of your zoom window. One is an 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 to interact with your fellow attendees. If you have a specific question you would like to have answered it 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 to knights event so for video or audio versions on her social channel later on. And importantly, to knights featured book, a good time to be born, is available for sale from greenlight bookstore. Were excited to offer actual shopping at our 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 at greenlightbookstore. 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 in the ongoing existence of independent bookstores, to knights signed featured book is a great way to show support for our interview tonight is andrew solomon. He is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and 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, an awardwinning film far from the tree. His books received National Book critics circle award for nonfiction as well as 25 other national and international awards. He is also the author of far and away, the National Book award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. The ironing tower and a novel, an activist and lgbtq to Rights Community health, education in the arts, andrew is a a foundef the solvent Research Fellowship in lgbtq status until universe answers on the board of the national Lgbtq Task Force university of michigan depression center, metropolitan museum of arts, the New York Public Library and 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 of nyu florence, National Medical director of reach out and read. She writes the check up for the new york times. Our new book, a good time to be born, is about the fight against Child Mortality the transformed parenting, doctrine and the way we live. Into leaving her own experience is as a medical student and doctor, she pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like rebecca crumpler, mary putnam and josephine baker, after the nurses, of the killed advocates and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. She is going to start us 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. It was an unpredictable risk that went along with being a parent. Now we expect children not to die. We are the like his parents 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 in hopeful expectation of seeing all our children survive and thrive. And were also the luckiest children in history, born into an era when we expect you to gp along with all our sisters and brothers. Driving down Child Mortality in the late 19th and early 20s century was in no way a single project that he can be seen as a unified human accomplishment, maybe even our greatest human accomplishment, at least for pediatricians and parents. The entire world has we learned with some shock and great sorrow how vulnerable are precious human bodies are to the microorganisms that find hue city defense of how we live, what we eat, how we travel. Parents have taken some comfort in knowing for the most part children have been less severely affected by covid19 but all through Human History babies and children have been a particularly fundable 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 weak, because he were born with congenital anomalies, because he got infections. Older infants and oneyearold died of summer diarrhea often caused by microbes in the water or in the cows milk they had started drinking after they had been weaned. Threeyearolds and fouryearolds and five and six and seven and eightyearold died of scarlet fever in diphtheria and pneumonia and measles, a skin infection that turned into sepsis or influenza that turned into pneumonia. As recent as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, almost every family in every ethnic group in every country, rich or poor, was touched in some way by the death of children. Child of death was always there in the shadows at the edge of the family landscape, and prayers and religious ceremonies, and the memorial portraits hanging on the wall, a popular sentimental poems and stories and dramas and paintings because they figured so consistently and childhood and family life. Child death also figured in the art and literature of songs and stories of child 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. W. D. From brooklyn in 1917. I am married 11 years last july and would have six children and were about to become mother again which are almost here i have now with two letter 161. 9 years and one of security. Two died several years ago. She didnt say how. But within a year she had two babies ended up losing both them. I gave birth to a Beautiful Boy and lived but three days. The doctor told her the baby had a leaking heart. Three months later she was pregnant again and the sunlit to be your old and she awoke one morning and found him dead alongside of me. Now pregnant again she werent constantly both about the terrible long labor shows likely to endure and about what would become of the baby. I try and live a good honest life and my home is my heaven and babies are my idol. 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 here established in 1912. This new federal Office Published pamphlets prenatal care and infant care in 1913 and 1914. It was popular. First distributed free of charge and provided by politicians to their constituents later available for purchase. By 1929 the government estimated the writings attached pairs of half the babies born in the United States. You can think how i feel, mrs. W. D. Wrote to the author of the pamphlet. I cried night and day because 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 living in 1917, when my grandmother lived at the new york city where my grandmother lived ten years before my own parents were born. At that time in 1917 when mrs. W. D. Broker letter, nearly a quarter of the children were not a life in the United States died before the fifth birthday. Those mothers wrote in the early decades of the 20th century with a certain hope from medical solutions comfort vice that my protect the next baby, even with the desire to extend the protection to all babies and children to join in the larger project the Childrens Bureau and its patents represented. I wish i could take up the work of promoting baby welfare wrote the woman had lost her child in illinois. Some of the letters were from women who struggled with written language and spelling others 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 United States more than 100 babies did not live to the first birthday and mortality rates were even higher among the rural poor, immigrants and africans americans. 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 in Middle America and in between england and is still true in the early 20th century. 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 19 century disadvantaged population including enslaved children and urban immigrant poor. I will stop there. Thank you for that lovely reading. Let me begin this conversation by saying that this is really quite a remarkable book. It has a rave review in the times. It was written in an engaging and even enthralling style. It takes a long with what you just heard how fluid and you bring together the amounts of relative abstract information. Likewise it details anecdotes and stories like the story that of mrs. W. D. , but many other stories. Those of the people who lost children, ranging across the entireocial spectrum, and the peop who figured out how to save childrenit by bit and overtime. Its a very sobering studyand a parent as will as a parent as well i was struck over and over what mustve been like to have two befor the more conditional attack mode. I thought it looke forward to many of the questions helicopr parenting and so on that our current at the moment. I wanted to ask you, harry, what is your sense of how people reonded psychologically and emotionall to these losses . Do you think bause they were, people were better protected against them or do you think the quality ofheir despair was the same as the quality of despair in someoneoses a child, for example, to sids which you write about in the book today . I think the quality of despair was the sam but in a strange way they were less isolated. Because it was so common because it was discussed because it was an experience everyone had had, i dont think i think we do read the accounts that parents write 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 it 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 those parents talk about how isolated they feel, that you cannot bring up casually or not so casually in coersation nowadays, we have three children but only two of the are living. That stops the conversation. Thats not something that is easily discu. In the past thereere ways because it was so common that you could at least acknowledge the child and acknowledge the grief. Talk a little bit in that context about some o 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 story you tell about the death of what would eventually his older brother. Ou know, i was actually writing about measles and i was looking for examples in art and literature of measles. Measles w was a disease that evy single child got before the was a vaccine because it was an incribly infectious disease, and is a fairly miserable disease. Children have high fevers, they feel terrible but most of them recover. But it is a disease which hits every single child when there are relatively rare complications, its a relatively rare cplication times all the children in the world. So you lose a fair number of children. Even so, when i looked for asles references, many of them, younow, a disease we get big spots, and most children recover. And then i was watching the performance of long days journey Eugene Oneills play which is so strongly autobiographical which we think of a play abo 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 by lost to measles. Aother who went away to be on the road with her actor husband, and she leaves with her own mother her sixyearold son and r baby. The sixyearold gets measles or, the older child gets measles and he goes into the room with the baby and the baby gets measles. The child recovers. The baby died and the mother never forget the self or having left the children, and she never forgives the sun to win into the ro 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. And 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 story 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 who were the visionaries who really let that process . Ieel 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 certnly to the 19th century inking about building come sewer systems and cleaning up their water. Thatsremendously 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 important, 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 reason that is important, that have something called cholera in hand with. Call the road that diarrhea. It killed thousands of babies every month in the summer. Theres not a full understanding either on the part of parents were on the part of the medical people where that comes from. Is it feeding babies the wrong food . Is it the heat . It bad spells . Is a poor ventilation . What it is is it a whole range of microbes that causes children to get stomach upset andhen 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 the dehydration. You have to go out anduy rehydration solution, you have to buy popsicles,eep putting the fluids back in. Yes, absolutely. And then talk about a subject i think hasnt received perhaps to the extent i should have, what was the rationship between the people who develop vaccines and help t control or at least address some of the problems, d the early stirring 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 interestg question, because righ around the beginning of the 19 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 breathe, are such a common fact life the nobody even necessarily really counts. At the beginning of the 20th century, 1906, six, a british doctor publishes a book called infant mortal