Paula S. Fass
"With her broad pediatric knowledge and warm understanding of parental attachments, Perri Klass tells the dramatic story of how medical science transformed childhood in the twentieth century…An important contribution to the history of childhood that can provide comfort and insight to all of us."
David Oshinsky
"Klass beautifully demonstrates how the fusion of medical science and public health led to the vaccines, antibiotics, safety measures, and self-help volumes that saved countless young lives while revolutionizing the ways in which we map our children’s future. Elegantly written, filled with memorable characters and events, A Good Time to Be Born is the perfect prescription for the uncertainties of our time."
New York Times - Christie Watson
"An ambitious, elegant meditation...[Klass] takes the most complex human patterns of all — history, medicine, politics, art — and knits them into something unique and beautiful."
Anne Fadiman
"All readers with an interest in the history of health care—and all parents who bite their nails over the relatively rare dangers facing their children now—will be riveted."
Atlantic - Kate Julian
"In her forthcoming book, A Good Time to Be Born...the pediatrician Perri Klass describes how the world—and with it, parenting—has been transformed by declining infant and child mortality over the past century."
Abraham Verghese
"Not too long ago, parents lived with the near certainty of losing a child or two; Perri Klass captures the drama of science and society’s triumph over that abysmal reality. As we grapple with new and unimaginable scourges, the lessons in this gripping, personal and beautifully researched chronicle could not be more relevant."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-09-01
A history of the scientific discoveries and public health mobilizations that made the world safer for children.
As late as the beginning of the 20th century, writes NYU journalism and pediatrics professor Klass, “childhood death was always there, in the shadows at the edge of the family landscape.” Children would die, “regularly and unsurprisingly,” from a host of contagions and infections, often in the forms of epidemics such as typhoid, cholera, polio, smallpox, and diphtheria. The author, a smooth storyteller, traces the arc of medical advancement targeted at that vulnerable population, suggesting that no segment of society was exempt. However, it was also clear that the poor, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and African Americans would suffer the most. In a remarkable fusion of science, public health, private institutions, and medicine, a slow but steadily growing movement brought necessary sanitation upgrades to cities and advanced understanding of bacteriology, virology, nutrition, and pharmacology. Klass effectively situates childhood deaths and the growth of pediatric medicine in both social and cultural contexts; one interesting section examines the subject via literature, including “sentimental poetry” and even gallows humor. “In that lost world in which dead children and mourning parents were routine and regular parts of life,” writes Klass, “morbid humor clearly had its place.” With steady narrative momentum, the author follows the long road that led to germ theory and the growing belief that it was “not just a parental obligation to prevent [childhood death] but a social responsibility.” Klass also chronicles the egregious missteps: eugenics, social Darwinism, and the racist, classist beliefs that hampered treatment for the poor and people of color. The author completes the picture with a range of subjects, including the dangers of childbirth; ethical issues in the neonatal unit; parents who don’t believe in vaccinations; psychosocial problems, including the shaming of “refrigerator mothers”; and the scourges of measles, chickenpox, polio, and tuberculosis.
A powerful story of the right of children to live and thrive from birth.
