{"product_id":"the-best-medicine-how-science-and-public-health-gave-children-a-future-9780393882384","title":"The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future","description":"\u003cp\u003eOnly 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePreviously published in hardcover as \u003cem\u003eA Good Time to Be Born\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e W. W. Norton \u0026amp; Company\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/19\/2022\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780393882384\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 400","brand":"Perri Klass","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41635448127669,"sku":"9780393882384","price":16.11,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_d9238ab7-2628-44fa-9630-fafe5b3a3799.jpg?v=1645501245","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/the-best-medicine-how-science-and-public-health-gave-children-a-future-9780393882384","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}