Teacher Stories
The Power of Stories and Early Relationships
March 5, 2021
When 4th grade teacher Miriam Marecek turned down the lights and lit the reading candle, magic happened. Pediatrician and journalist Perri Klass describes what it was like being one of Ms. Marecek's students and the impact it's had on her life and professional career. Now, as national medical director for Reach Out and Read, Dr. Klass, promotes books and reading aloud, together, starting at birth.
Teacher Stories
The Power of Stories and Early Relationships
March 5, 2021
When 4th grade teacher Miriam Marecek turned down the lights and lit the reading candle, magic happened. Pediatrician and journalist Perri Klass describes what it was like being one of Ms. Marecek's students and the impact it's had on her life and professional career. Now, as national medical director for Reach Out and Read, Dr. Klass, promotes books and reading aloud, together, starting at birth.
Teacher Stories
The Power of Stories and Early Relationships
March 5, 2021
When 4th grade teacher Miriam Marecek turned down the lights and lit the reading candle, magic happened. Pediatrician and journalist Perri Klass describes what it was like being one of Ms. Marecek's students and the impact it's had on her life and professional career. Now, as national medical director for Reach Out and Read, Dr. Klass, promotes books and reading aloud, together, starting at birth.
Talk Nerdy
Childhood Vaccines w/ Perri Klass
Feb. 15, 2021
In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara Santa Maria is joined by NYU professor of journalism and pediatrics Dr. Perri Klass to talk about her new book, "A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future." They examine the profound impact that medical advancements like vaccines have had on infant mortality and public health. Also discussed: the often-overlooked women and minority practitioners who changed the course of human history.
The Best Medicine
How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future
The fight against child mortality that transformed parenting, doctoring, and the way we live.
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.