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).

From 1999 to 2004 Maartje van Putten served as a member of the World Bank's Inspection Panel. Using personal experience and extensive interviews with principal decision-makers and stakeholders in the Panel's work, she chronicles the history of accountability in the World Bank and other major financial entities.

Describing how formerly secretive financial institutions have been slow to accept responsibility for the consequences of their investments - especially the problems that can result from projects in developing countries - she shows that financing institutions can cause significant social and environmental damage and argues that new accountability mechanisms are necessary to reduce or prevent such damage. Because such institutions operate on a global scale, only semi-judicial accounting mechanisms can provide the necessary accountability. It is time for the private financial sector to follow multilateral financial institutions in creating independent mechanisms, mediation procedures, and access to decision makers for people harmed or potentially harmed by projects financed by their institutions.

Policing the Banks is a passionate plea for global accountability for all powerful financial players - including the transnational private banks that are now entering the scramble for profits from development projects in the third world.