Healing the World's Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century (review)

In Healing the World's Children, Cynthia Comacchio, Janet Golden, and George Weisz offer readers diverse perspectives on the state of child health. The volume is a product of the "Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Child Health in the Twentieth Century" colloquium held at the McCord Museum and McGill University in fall 2004 and includes a wide range of authors and disciplines. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars in film and cultural studies reach beyond their primary subjects of study to consider problems in childhood studies. The result is somewhat uneven, but interested readers will find broad reviews and updated scholarship and will, perhaps, be provoked by a number of contributors who offer fresh insights as they reach across fields.

The collection opens with an introduction that traces major declarations issued about the health and protection of the young over the course of the twentieth century, evidence of a recent awareness toward child-centered issues. Through new policies and practices, landmark improvements have been made in children's lives. The editors caution, however, that the story of child health has been one of stagnation and decline if considered from a global perspective. It is only by widening our scope to address all populations in need, they claim, that high rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability will be brought under management.

The landscape the editors set out to cover is ambitious, yet it is difficult to skillfully reframe such a range of conference papers into a single, cohesive volume. The authors explicitly acknowledge the difficulties of such a project, saying that the field is too large for them to capture all of its complexities. Thus, they have aimed for a "kaleidoscopic" image of child health or, in other words, a "swirl" of "elements in a state of motion" (p. 7). Yet one theme that the scholars share is that of restoring children's voices and recognizing their agency in shaping policy and their environment. All of the authors seek to put children at the center of their work—a goal of much recent scholarship in childhood studies.

The essays, broken into five interrelated sections, begin with lengthy reviews of three geographic areas—North America, Europe, and Latin America. Neil Sutherland's essay on North America treads familiar ground, but the Latin American essay, in particular, is a rich contribution for both its new perspectives and rich bibliography. The second section explores the meanings and representations of children. The essays focus on the "selling" of disability and the trope of "child as victim" in modern AIDS coverage in Africa. Much has been written about the use of images and narratives of ill children by hospitals and voluntary agencies, but this essay stands apart because of the author's personal experience as a parent of a child with a disability. The third section explicitly centers on capturing children's voices. Myra Bluebond-Langner has long used interviews to explore children's experiences of cancer and their own interpretations of diagnosis, treatment, and death. Her essay is a thoughtful continuation of this extended study. Mona Gleason's essay is focused on interpretation mediated through the body but adds memories of Canadian adults to compare "expert sources" with lived experiences. It is a concern that children's voices have been "mediated by memory or the interview process" in both essays, yet there are limited methods for capturing and interpreting children's experiences without these tools. Finding original sources remains a work in progress for many scholars in the field. The fourth section attempts to address the problems of defining and measuring children health and its consequences for policy making. In contrast, the two essays in the final section discuss qualitative representations of children—in paintings and photographs.

Healing the World's Children is a valuable addition...