Perri Klass

Perri Klass is an American pediatrician and writer who has published extensively about her medical training and pediatric practice. Among her subjects have been the issues of women in medicine, relationships between doctors and patients, and children and literacy. She is the author of both fiction and nonfiction novels, stories, essays, and journalism. Dr. Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national childhood literacy program that works through doctors and nurses to encourage parents to read aloud to young children, and to give them the books they need to do it. She is a member of the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and has been nominated by the President of the United States to the Advisory Board of the National Institute For Literacy.

Klass was born in Trinidad, where her father, Morton Klass, was doing anthropological field work. She grew up in New York City and Leonia, New Jersey. Her father was an anthropology professor at Barnard College, and her mother a novelist and professor of English at the City University of New York. Dr. Klass received her A.B. in Biology from Harvard University in 1979. Klass went on to earn her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1986, and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital, Boston, and her fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital.

During her years at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Klass began to chronicle her medical training. In 1984, as a third-year medical student, she wrote a series of columns, published in the New York Times in the series of “Hers Columns,” describing, among other things, the uncertainty of drawing blood for the very first time, the peculiar locutions of hospital jargon, and the emotional subtext of crying in the hospital. She also wrote, in the New York Times Magazine, about the experience of having a baby while in medical school. She went on to write many articles and columns about her training, originally published in Discover Magazine, American Health, Massachusetts Medicine, and other magazines, and later collected in two books about medical training, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student, and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training.

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