Healing the World's Children

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.The 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.