Oh, Alice, this sad story keeps coming back and back and back - the idea
among health workers or trainee health workers that breastfeeding is suspect
or that it is, at best, an intervention. Each time, it is sad, particularly
because these people will each influence many others (mothers, colleagues,
policy-makers, future students). Ties up with this particular instance is a
blind spot as regards even thinking of supplementing the mother (not the
baby) and ignorance of mothers' capacity to produce milk even when poorly
nourished and under stress. The act of breastfeeding can indeed be calming.
It is also part of a view that breastfeeding is as costly as artificial
feeding because you have to feed the mother - often over-estimating and
costing on foods brought long distances, instead of locally available foods.
None of this is new, and I don't mean just going back a few decades. La
Berge's excellent paper on the life and work of early French paediatric
author, Alfred Donne, mentioned that, not only did he advise applying
stringent criteria in the selection of a wet-nurse, he also applied
stringent conditions on whether a mother should be permitted to breastfeed
her own baby. Only if permitted by her medical man should a mother
breastfeed her biological baby and permission wasn't to be assumed. When was
Donne writing? The 1840s, his child-care book requiring a second edition in
1846. No, this isn't the earliest such advice - just one I had at hand while
writing this. (Donne has an acute accent on the "e".)
[La Berge A, Mothers and infants, nurses and nursing. Alfred Donne and the
medicalization of child care in nineteenth-century Franch. Juprnal of the
history of Medicine and Allied Science 1991; 46.]
Virginia
Dr Virginia Thorley OAM, PhD,IBCLC, FILCA
Private Practice Lactation Consultant
Historian of Medicine
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Alice Farrow wrote on 07 October, 2013 5:46 AM:
Pat, I have just done a health science module with the Open University UK,
for my IBCLC exam prerquisites - in particular we studied water and health
and the illnesses caused by lack of access to clean water. We studied
Kibera, the Kenyan slum (circa 170,000 people) where the health clinics
don't even have running water - I saw video footage of just buckets on the
floor for hand washing. Unfortunately, despite studied infant malnutrition
and diahoerreal diseases, breastfeeding was just not mentioned. I brought
this up on our student forum and was basically 'slammed' by a few other
students -'how do you expect malnourished mothers to feed infants etc.'.
These are the health care workers of the future. We need to impact
university texts and curriculums....
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