Perri klass

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 390, Issue 6, Page 492-495, February 2024.

A medical narrative from a woman in her 90s describes her childhood bout with diphtheria in Kansas City, Missouri, apparently immediately after vaccination, her confinement in the "pest hospital," and her treatment with what she understood as a blood transfusion from a donor who was found through a radio appeal. In this essay, we trace the narrative back to the institutions, medical practices, and historical context, examining both the underlying history of medical practice and scientific understanding that is reflected in her experience and also the contexts of that history, including racial and religious attitudes...

Clinicians who want to communicate child advocacy messages, stories, and arguments can draw on their clinical and scientific experience, but effective communication to wider--and nonmedical--audiences requires careful thought. We discuss choosing and honing the message, developing writing and speaking skills that fit both the exigencies of the chosen medium and format, including op-eds, essays, social media, public testimony, and speeches. We provide guidance on proposing articles, working with editors, shaping language and diction for a general audience, and drawing on clinical experiences while respecting confidentiality...

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 386, Issue 24, Page 2257-2259, June 2022.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 386, Issue 13, Page 1202-1205, March 2022.

We reflect on our experience co-teaching a medical humanities elective, "Pandemics and Plagues," which was offered to undergraduates during the Spring 2021 semester, and discuss student reactions to studying epidemic disease from multidisciplinary medical humanities perspectives while living through the world Covid-19 pandemic. The course incorporated basic microbiology and epidemiology into discussions of how epidemics from the Black Death to HIV/AIDS have been portrayed in history, literature, art, music, and journalism...

Poverty-related disparities appear early in life in cognitive, language, and social-emotional development, and in growth, especially obesity, and have long-term consequences across the life course. It is essential to develop effective strategies to promote healthy behaviors in pregnancy and the early years of parenthood that can mitigate disparities. Primary preventive interventions within the pediatric primary care setting offer universal access, high engagement, and population-level impact at low cost. While many families in poverty or with low income would benefit from preventive services related to both development and growth, most successful interventions have tended to focus on only one of these domains...

OBJECTIVE:  Early meaningful auditory experiences in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) enhance language outcomes and promote cognitive and social-emotional development. METHODS:  This is a descriptive report sharing our level III NICU experience of building a reading-aloud enrichment program with the goals of enhancing infant neurodevelopment and strengthening early parent-infant relationships. RESULTS:  We propose a roadmap for program development, outline challenges and possible ways to mitigate them, and highlight opportunities for further research in this area...

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 384, Issue 13, Page 1186-1189, April 2021.

Importance: Literacy has been described as an important social determinant of health. Its components emerge in infancy and are dependent on genetic, medical, and environmental factors. The American Academy of Pediatrics advocates a substantial role for pediatricians in literacy promotion, developmental surveillance, and school readiness to promote cognitive, relational, and brain development. Many children, especially those from minority and underserved households, enter kindergarten unprepared to learn to read and subsequently have difficulty in school...

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 384, Issue 7, Page 589-591, February 2021.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Poverty remains a critical predictor of children's school readiness, health and longer term outcomes. Early relational health (ERH) (ie, parenting practices and relationship quality) mediates the impact of poverty on child development, and thus has been the focus of many parenting interventions. Despite the documented efficacy of parenting interventions at reducing poverty-related disparities in child health and development, several key barriers prevent achieving population-level reach to families with young children...

Two pediatric accidents in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) and one in Margaret Oliphant's The Doctor's Family (1863) are examined from the point of view of trauma management with analysis of contributing risk factors, medical management, concerns of parents and bystanders, and course of recovery. Risk factors for injury are impulsivity, poor supervision, and parents who are unable to set limits. Medical attention is swift and competent, but no heroic measures are used; the management of the injuries, concussion with loss of consciousness and dislocation of the collar bone, is consistent with the way these conditions are, for the most part, still managed today, and successful recovery depends on careful nursing and rest...

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 383, Issue 10, Page 905-907, September 2020.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Attendance at well-child visits (WCVs) is a sine qua non of preventive care. We hypothesized that Reach Out and Read (ROR) would be associated with better WCV attendance. Parents of children 76 to 72 months at 8 clinics who did not yet have ROR reported how many WCVs their child had attended in the previous year; separate samples at the same clinics were interviewed 16 months after the ROR program was instituted. Comparing 267 parents before ROR and 254 after, the percentage who had attended the minimum number of WCVs required by the American Academy of Pediatrics periodicity schedule rose from 67...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

When I talk about child poverty, I often begin with iconic 19th-century literary images: Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl, freezing to death on the street on New Year’s Eve — the poor child as helpless victim of adult cruelty (if she failed to sell matches, "her father would surely beat..