Norma,
Yes, I realised the series was set in Poplar, a very poor area of East London. Your description of your family's experience is pretty typical of the period. As you stated, the government-issued National Dried Milkwas basically dried cow's milk. Early in the 20th century in England, there had been a huge number of foods promoted for feeding infants, but times were hard after World War II. In a history of Glaxo, it is stated that, when this dried milk from New Zealand cows was launched in London in 1906, it had 300 competitors. (This would have included foods promoted for invalids, as well as babies, condensed cow's milk of various brands, other cow's-milk products, farinaceous infant foods for feeding by bottle, and other products.)
We spent a year in England when I was 6-7 years old, a bit before this, and even at this age I was eligible for the NHS orange juice and cod-liver oil. The orange juice was, you will recall, in a highly processed, concentrated form by Allenbys. I saw it in shops in Australia in the 1960s, but it wasn't widely used.
In Australia, the move from birthing at home or in small nursing homes to hospitals came earlier. A paper by Wendy Madsen in Health & History a few years ago has details of this and her research on the small, midwife-run nursing homes in one city between the two World Wars.
In the postwar period, including into the 1960s, new mothers here in Austrlaia, too, were made to restrict the length of feeds and not to feed in under 4 hours (or 3 hours in some situations).(1, 2) With the "feeds" so short, there wasn't much time for the MER to occur, which one of the mother I interviewed for a study particularly remarked on. Breastfeeding started with 2 mins per side on the first day and built up to a maximum of 10+10 minutes.(1) Most women started breastfeeding, but the duration was declining (and no wonder). It was rarely exclusive breastfeeding, as orange juice, water and other supplements were common, whether or not women followed all the advice from the clinic nurses. In Queensland, the salty yeast extract, Vegemite, was ordered for vitamin B1 from 3-6 weeks at the nurse-run baby clinics, and around 5 months in Tasmania. (Compliance is a different issue, that I shan't discuss here.)
Earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, products promoted for feeding babies were many, whether promoted specifically for infant feeding or for "infants, invalids and the aged". By the postwar period many of these brands were no longer around. Many mothers used recipes for home-modifying fresh, dried, or evaporated cow's milk, adding "sugar of milk" or cane sugar. However, the companies had access to new mothers by way of the literature they provided, which was handed out by hospital staff, till this practice was ended in the mid-1990s. Of course there were also mothers who used the commercial brands available, especially when money became less scarce and more brands came on the market. Breastfeeding in Australia hit its lowest point in the late-1960s, before the beginning of a reversal of this trend in the early-1970s (1971 in Victoria).
Virginia
References:
(1) Thorley V. Initiating breastfeeding in postwar Queensland. Breastfeeding Review 2001; 9(3): 21-26.
(2) Thorley V. Midwives, trainees and mothers: maternoty hospial conditions in postwar Queensland. Birth Issues 2001;10: 101-106.
Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA
Historian of Medicine
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
----- Original Message -----
From: Norma Ritter
To: [log in to unmask] ; Lactnet
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 4:53 AM
Subject: Re: "The Midwives" PBS TV show
My local PBS station said that "The Midwives* was set in 1957 in Poplar, in the East End of London. I was brought up in that area, about 2 miles away in Stepney Green, and would have been about 12 years old at that time.
My own mother gave birth to both me and my younger sister in a maternity home, the equivalent of a birthing center in the USA. When I asked about our births, she would only say that she was grateful for the twilight sleep and that when my turn came, I would forget the pain when I held my baby in my arms. Apparently, she never did forget the pain :(
I remember my mother going into the bedroom to nurse my sister, but that only lasted for a couple of weeks at most before she was switched to formula. I know that my mother tried to nurse me, but she was only allowed to do so for a few minutes on one side only every four hours (except at night,) and them instructed to *top me off* with formula. No wonder that when she was released after the usual 10 day stay, she was told she did not have enough milk. She told me that during her entire hospital stay the nurses watched her vigilantly to make sure she never took off any of the swaddling in which I was wrapped. Hmmm...
The *formula* on which my sister and I were fed came in a tall, cylindrical cardboard container labelled *National Dried Milk.* If was given out - free, I believe - at the local well-baby clinics, which mothers attended every week to get their babies weighed. I remember that it is was a blue package which pronounced the contents to contain dried milk powder, 4% fat. The instructions said to mix it with water and sugar. Both orange juice and cod liver oil were also given to babies to make up for any vitamin deficiencies. Those cylindrical were used and reused, so they were always in evidence in our apartment, even years after the original contents had been consumed.
I still have the baby book my mother was given after my birth, with instructions for breastfeeding. Funnily enough, artificial feeding is barely mentioned, but the expectation was that all babies would be completely weaned from breast or bottle by 9 months of age.
Norma Ritter, IBCLC, RLC
Breastfeeding Matters in the Capital Region
www.NormaRitter.com
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