A Good Time to Be Born

Klass masterfully introduces readers to the people coming up with solutions for many of the dangers of childhood and shows how the pediatric specialty over time has worked to improve children's lives. Essential reading for parents.--Margaret Henderson 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.--Christie Watson A powerful story of the right of children to live and thrive from birth. The result of Klass's erudition and nuance is a fascinating look at a seldom-sung but profound change in the human condition. 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.--David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Polio: A History 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.--Abraham Verghese, MD, author of Cutting for Stone 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.--Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down 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.--Paula S. Fass, author of The End of American Childhood