With perri klass presenting her new book a good time to be born and their talking with Andrew Solomon and before we start i just want to say a huge thanks to parry, andrew and the team at norton for making this happen and to all of you for showing up. We are not able to host this event in our store space in our community as authors and readers is still here and 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 and they can seat you are here though and you can see account of your fellow attendees at the top of your zumba screen. And there are a couple of functions we will be using throughout the event you can find at the bottom of your resume window and one is an icon labeled chat with ones Speech Bubble and youre welcome to post your comments and thoughts in the chat and 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 and you can find it by clicking on the icon labeled q and eight which looks like two Speech Bubbles. We will be pulling questions only from the q a to be answered in the later part of the program. We are recording tonights event so i look for video or audio versions on our special channels later on and importantly tonights features book a good time to be born is available for sale from Greenlight Bookstore and we are excited to offer actual shopping at our bookstore locations noon until 7 00 p. M. Every day of the week and you can purchase perris book and many others on site or online at relied bookstore. Com for a quick pick up at the store or for shipping anywhere in the u. S. If you care about supporting careers of authors and the ongoing existence of independent bookstores find tonights future book is a great way to show your support. And now to introduce tonight speakers, are interviewer tonight is Andrew Solomon. He is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology and professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia UniversityMedical Center and the former president of penn america. Most recently he made an audio series called new family values and awardwinning film called far from the tree. It received a National Book critics circle award for nonfiction and along with 20 international and Non International awards but hes also the author of far and away the National Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Hes an activist and lgbtq rights education in the arts and andrew is the founder of the Solomon Research Fellowship for lgbt studies at Yale University and serves on the board of the national Lgbtq Task Force university of Michigan Center the metropolitan museum of art the New York Public Library and many others. Andrew will be speaking with our featured author. Klass. She is professor of journalism in pediatrics at new york university, codirector of nyu florence and National Medical director of reach out and read. She writes the weeks collin the checkup for the New York Times and her new book, a good time to be born, is about the fight against Child Mortality that transforms parenting from a doctoring the way we live. She weaves her own experience as a medical student doctor, she pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like rebecca crumpler, mary putnam and Josephine Baker. About sanitation and vaccination of families. Pair he will start us off with a reading from the book and then she will be talking with andrew and with all of you. Perri, please take it away. Thank you. Our grandparents and greatgrandparents and all the parents before throughout history expected that children would die. It was a known and protectable risk that went along with being a parent. Now we expect children not to die. We are the luckiest parents 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 in the hopeful expectation of seeing all our children survive and thrive and we are also the luckiest children in history born into an era when we can 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 compliment and even though our greatest human account was meant at least four pediatricians. The entire world has relearned with some shock and great sorrow how vulnerable our precious human bodies are with microorganisms that find ways to take advantage of how we live, how we eat, how we travel and parents have taken some comfort in knowing that for the most part parents 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 and babies died to birth or soon after because they were premature or just weak because they were born with congenital anomalies and because they got infections, older infants and one years old died of diarrhea caused by microbes in the water or from the cows milk they started drinking after they had been weaned and three yearolds and four yearolds and five, six, seven, eight yearold died of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and ammonia and measles and Skin Infections are turned into sepsis or influenza that turned into pneumonia and as recently as late 19th and 20 century almost every family in every ethnic group and every country, rich or poor, was touched in some way by the death of children and childhood deaths were always there in the shadows at the edge of the family gates, and prayers and religious ceremonies and in the memorial portrait hanging on the wall and popular sentimental poems and traumas and stories and paintings because they figured so consistently in childhood and family life and child deaths figured in the art of literature and songs and stories of childhood and family life and from a century though as they had all through Human History and i am a lover of babies and i cant to have them wrote missus wd from brooklyn in 1917 and i married 11 years last july and would have six children and im about to become a mother again which i almost fear i am now but two out of 61 boys nine years and one six years. Two of apparently died seven years ago and she did not say how but then within a year she had two babies and thats lost both of them. I gave birth to a beautiful fat boy and it lived for three days the doctor told her the baby had of weak hearts. Two month later she was pregnant again and this son lived to be a year old and then she woke one morning and found him dead along side of me now pregnant again she worries constantly both about the terrible long labor she was going to endure and about what we would become of the baby and i tried to live a good, honest life but my home and babies are my idol and i love them but i am afraid something will happen to this one again. She was writing this letter to United States government into the Childrens Bureau established in 1912 in this new federal law published pamphlets prenatal care to infant care in 1913 and in 1914 and immediately it was popular and at first it was just riveted free of charge and provided by politicians to their constituents and later available for purchase and by 1929 the government estimated these writings had touched half the babies born in the United States and he can think how i feel missus wd wrote of the pamphlets and i cried night and day for my big fat baby taken from eat like that and missus wd was not living in the middle ages but living in the Victorian Era and living in 1917 when my grandmother lived and in new york city where my grandmother lived in ten years before my own parents were born and at that time in 1917 when missus wd wrote her letter nearly a quarter of the children werent alive in the United States and those mothers wrote in the early decades of the 20th century with a certain hope for medical solutions for advice that might protect the next baby, even with a desire to extend that protection to all babies and to all children and to joins in the larger project and what it represented and i wish i could take up the work wrote a woman who lost her child in illinois. Some of the letters were from women struggling with written language and spelling and others educated in the privileged and there was no segment of society where childrens lives were secure nor has there ever been and the statistical evidence had been complete infant and Child Mortality in both europe and america was extremely high through the 17th and early 18th century with a third of all children or in some cases, even 40 or more dying before they outgrew childhood. In the first decade of the 20th century when my grandmother was going up out of every thousand lives in the United States almost one hunter babies do not live to their first birthdays and mortality rates were even higher among the poor, immigrants and african americans. In the event which at a rate for United States in 2017 was 5. 8 deaths per thousand live births and the majority of these deaths before the first birthday occurred in the first month 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 and remarkable fusion of science and Public Health of medicines and that transformed our families, emotional landscape and even our souls. All through Human History many babies died at birth and many children died before seen it childhood and this was true to the middle ages and renaissance and colonial america and victorian england and still true in the early 20th century. If you went around any table pretty much everyone wouldve lost a sibling in childhood or lost a friend to death at a young age or lost a child. Infant and Child Mortality where the facts of life or almost every family, rich or poor. John d rockefellers richest man in the world founded the Rockefeller Institute with his grandson died of scarlet fever and the mortality was higher among 19th century this included children in the urban immigrant poor. Thank you for that. That was a lovely reang. Let me begin thi conversation by sayg that its quite a Remarkable Book and it does have a rave review in the tes and its wrien in an engaging and even enthralling the style and it ticks along what you just heard is how fent pair he is bringing together enormous amounts of relatively abstract informatn but likewise it details, anecdotes and stories like the story that missus wd but many other stories in both of the peoe who lost children, ranging across the entire social spectrum and theeople who figured out how to save children bit by bit and over time. Its a very sobering study as a parent mht well, i was very struck over and over again by what it mustve been like to have to form a more conditional attachment to your children and i thought it looked forward to many of the questions helicopter parenting and so on that are current at the moment but i wanted to ask you. , what is your sen of how people rponded psychologically and emotionally to these lses . To think that because they were comm people were better protected ainst them or do you think the quality of their despair was t same as equality of despair and someone who loses a child, f 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 and because it was an experience everyone had had, i dont think or i think that when you read the accounts that parents write you can see they loved the children just as much and in the same ways you can see they were remembered and you can even see they went over and over at the question of good i have, if we hadnt moved to the city, if i hadnt done this, if i hadnt done that and they did all of that but they did it for the company and one of the things that struck me is that when i talk to people who have lost children in recent years because of course its not a perfectly safe place and tragedies happen many of those parents to talk about how isolated they feel and that is to say you cannot bring up casually or not so casually in conversation nowadays and we have three children but only two of them are with it and that stops the conversation and that is not something that can easily be discussed and i think there were ways because it was so common that you could at least acknowledge thehild and acknowledged the hurt. Talk a littl bit in that context about somef the where it clearly cuts deep over the quality of accusations have cut soeep and in particularl of [inaudible]s mother and the story you tell about the death of his that would have been his older brother. Yeah, you know, i was writing about and i was looking for examples in art and literature of measles and measles is a disease that every single child got before there was a vaccine because it was an incredibly Infectious Disease and its a fairly miserable disease so if you have high [inaudible] but most recover but in the disease which hits every single child when there are relatively rare convocations is a relatively rare complication times all the children in the world so you lose a fair number of children and even so when i looked for peoples records in art and literature many were common and this disease were you get [inaudible] but in most children recover and then i was watching a performance of a long days journey into night and its strongly autobiographical and which we think of as a play about addiction and the mother is addicted to opiates and the father and the sons drink too much and at the center of the play is this tragedy of of baby lost to measles and a mother who went away to be on the road with her husband and she leaves with her own mother and her six yearold son and her baby in the six yearold gets measles or you know if the older child gets measles and he is allowed to go into the room were the baby is and the baby gets measles and the child recovers but the baby dies. The mother never forgive herself for having left her children and never forgives the son who went into the room and expected his younger brother and she thanks he did it on purpose because he was jealous of the baby and that is common childhood disease basically comes in to this family and devastates the fami family. Right. And its all true. The mother was the child who would have been butes the reconciliation baby born later to more or less take the place of the other boy who died. Talk a little bit and i think all of us know that there was enormous medical progress and that the development of vaccines has made an extraordinary difference to the lives of children but the Public Health story is less well known. How was the information, not only about getting vaccines but also about other measures that were hopeful to children and how would this disseminated and were the visionaries really lead that process . I feel a little guilty. I feel there are probably heroic things in sanitation that i probably dont know because im looking but would start by going back certainly to the 19th century thinking about the citys building sewer systems and cleaning up their water and that is tremendously important but then when you dash one of the things thats happening in the 19th century where people are figured out the importance of microbes and the importance of bacteria and you have hester doing his experiments and later developing the pasteurization which can make milk safe and all of that is tremendous and important and just as you say it hast to get to the individual households. Parents have to understand the dangers of letting milk spoil or using water you dont know whether it is pure and one of the reasons important is because especially in summers, especially in the cities around the turnofthecentury there is this understanding that in the summer come something they call cholera and fantasy, its not cholera but just upset stomach, diarrhea and it kills thousands of babies every month in the summer and there is 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 or is it the heat or is it, you know, poor ventilation or what it is is its all that whole range of microbes that causes children to get stomachs upsets and then babies are so vulnerable to dehydration and it is still true if youve ever brought a sick baby to a stomach bug and your pediatrician probably told you the infection will not do any harm but if the dehydration and you got to go out and buy rehydration solution and by obstacles and keep putting the fluids back in. Yes, absolutely. Talk about because a subject i think happened received what was the relationship between the people who developed vaccines and help to control or at least address so many of these problems and the early starting of the Eugenics Movement and the notion that where these childrens lived and these unworthy children dying. So, thats a really interesting question because right around the beginning of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century people start counting dead