Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

0/5 ( ratings)

Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers—of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. For children of the poor, immigrants, enslaved people and their descendants, the chances of dying were far worse.

The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life.

Previously published in hardcover as A Good Time to Be Born.

Pages: 400

Format: Paperback

Release: April 19, 2022

ISBN 13: 9780393882384

The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

0/5 ( ratings)

Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers—of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. For children of the poor, immigrants, enslaved people and their descendants, the chances of dying were far worse.

The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life.

Previously published in hardcover as A Good Time to Be Born.

Pages: 400

Format: Paperback

Release: April 19, 2022

ISBN 13: 9780393882384

More books from Perri Klass

The Mercy Rule

The Mystery of Breathing

2.9/5 ( ratings)

Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included)

3.4/5 ( ratings)

Baby Doctor

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Other Women's Children

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Love and Modern Medicine: Stories

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor

Glimmer Train Stories, #104

Second Impact

Only You

Not Entirely Benign Procedure, Revised Edition: Four Years as a Medical Student

Berkeley Fiction Review, Volume 4

The Real Life of a Pediatrician (Kaplan Voices: Doctors)

A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student

Manners Begin at Breakfast: Modern Etiquette for Families

Her Own Accord: American Women on Identity, Culture, and Community

I Am Having an Adventure

Rate this book!

Write a review?