In 1990, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child declared that children's "survival, protection, growth and development in good health and with proper nutrition is the essential foundation of human development." Drawing from many disciplines - history, anthropology, demography, art history, disability studies, and sociology - and across a broad geography, Healing the World's Children sheds light on the medical, political, and cultural dimensions of the efforts to preserve and protect the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.
Essays range from historical overviews and historiographic surveys of children's health in various regions of the world, to disability and affliction narratives - from polio in North American to AIDS orphans in post-Apartheid South Africa - to interpretations of artistic renderings of sick children that tell us much about medicine, family, and society at specific times in history.
Taking care to position children at the centre of the analysis, Healing the World's Children provides a unique international and interdisciplinary perspective on a critical twentieth-century project - saving children - that remains a challenge in our own time.
Contributors include Anne-Emanuelle Birn (University of Toronto), Laurie Block (Straight Ahead Pictures & Disability Museum), Myra Bluebond-Langner and Megan Norquest Schwallie (Rutgers), Jeffrey P. Brosco (University of Miami School of Medicine), Didier Fassin (University of Paris North & École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Mona Gleason (UBC), Vincent Lavoie (UQAM), Loren Lerner (Concordia), Richard Meckel (Brown), Catherine Rollet (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), and Neil Sutherland (emeritus, UBC).
Review quotes
"Essays that seek to include the voices of children are particularly admirable. Healing the World's Children is an original and worthwhile contribution." Geoffrey Reaume, author of Lyndhurst and Remembrance of Patients Past
Cynthia Comacchio, professor of history, Wilfrid Laurier University, is the author of 'Nations Are Built of Babies': Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children, 1900-40, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940, and The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920-50.
Janet Golden is professor of history, Rutgers University, and the author of several books including Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
George Weisz is Cotton-Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine, McGill University and the author of several books, including Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization.
