Karleen asks about feeding newborn babies butter in Iceland.  The Norwegian
ethnologist Lily Weisser Aall studied customs and traditions around
breastfeeding in Norway, and reported that a Danish doctor, Biarne Povelsen,
published in 1772 a description from a stay in Iceland, where he noted that
mothers did not breastfeed.  Newborns were cared for by neighbors or older
relatives, who fed them "raw cow's milk, pre-chewed fish, and meat. The
wealthiest people used cream and butter.  This led to a monstrous infant
mortality.  A mother had to figure on giving birth to 10-15 babies in order
for three to survive."  (Text in quotes is my translation from Elisabet
Helsing's book 'Boken om amming' from 1995, ISBN 82 05 22652 0), and she is
quoting from page 29 in Weisser Aall's paper of 1973, 'Omkring de nyfødtes
stell og nyere norsk overlevering', which seems to be a monograph in the
series from Norsk Etnologisk Granskning number 8, Oslo: Norsk Folkemuseum.
These are unpublished but are in the archives of the Folklore Museum in Oslo
and if you need more information I'm sure the museum would be happy to
help.)
From the same chapter in Boken om Amming is the account of another doctor,
A. Schleisner, who worked in Iceland in the mid-1800's and reported that it
was common to place newborns in a kind of foster care, where they were fed
cow's milk and the like, but a midwife trained in Copenhagen had succeeded
in convincing the mothers of Reykjavik and other trade centers to
breastfeed, with much better results for child health.  The writers
speculate that there may have been an element of hazing in this practice; if
a baby survived, it had a really strong constitution and would make it,
where if it didn't, it didn't deserve to.  Kind of a rough version of
eugenics and one that fortunately has been relegated to history's scrap heap
in this part of the world.

In Norway a tradition of pre-lacteal feeds also existed, and was dying out
by 1900.  It seems to have been most widespread in the inland valleys, which
were often more isolated from new cultural impulses active elsewhere in
society.  Babies were first given rich food normally reserved for festive
occasions, such as sour cream porridge (which is actually delicious,
especially with salt-cured meat and caraway schnapps and beer and
flatbread!) or coffee cakes.  This was meant to protect the child from
hunger in later life.  In the north, there are reports of the Sami people
using bone marrow from reindeer for the same purpose.  

In the same chapter in Helsing's book there is a chart showing BF initiation
and continuation rates for Norway since 1860 (yes, eighteen sixty, not a
typo) and I see that we are just now reaching continuation rates similar to
those around 1910, when about 36 percent of one year olds were breastfed, as
they are today.  

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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