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.
