On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:32:44 -0400 Marsha Walker wrote:
" The new formula from Mead Johnson, RestFull, probably contains
tryptophan as a sleep inducer among other things. Human milk contains
this, but infant formula has little. So now with this new formula,
parents can purchase an AM formula for during the day and a PM formula
for before naps and bedtime. RestFull seems designed to sedate the
baby, make him sleep longer, solve sleep problems, keep him full
longer, etc. One has to wonder what metabolic effect slowing down the
digestive process will have on an infant, whether longer sleep will
affect cognitive development as the infant is exposed to shorter
periods of learning time, what artificially controlling sleep patterns
will do, and how much money this will place in the pockets of Mead
Johnson. "
Marsha, and everyone:
Dosing babies and drugging them to the eyeballs is not new, as you will
know. In England in the 19th century, it used to be opiates, most "soothing
syrups" having consisted of laudanum and syrup. They were used for
"soothing", including during teething, for "colic", and in the belief that
it would strengthen the heart of a sickly baby. For the poor, when work was
scarce in the 1830s, laudanum was cheaper than bread for quieting hungry
children. Queen Victoria's "surgeon-accoucher" (obstetrician) included in
his advice to Prince Albert for the royal nursery warnings about making sure
the nursemaids, often country girls, didn't administer these soothing syrups
to the royal babies.(1) Opiates were used for babies, especially sick ones,
in the previous century, by doctors such as Erasmus Darwin.(2) As late as
the early 20th-century, advice for mothers sometimes mentioned avoiding
dosing with opiates.
In the 19th and early-20th centuries, alcohol was an ingredient of colic
drops and cough medicines. In fact, as late as the 1960s, a Queensland
newspaper ran a report about older women who had hidden alcohol problems,
going from pharmacy to pharmacy to buy a particular brand of cough mixture,
so as not to buy it at the one place and rouse suspicion.
With "soothing" a very popular word in relation to babies at the moment, it
is no surprise that commercial interests are finding new ways to promote the
same idea. Sleep and babies was a selling point in advertisements for many
artificial feeding products and complementary foods marketed to infants (as
well as to "invalids and the aged") into the 20th century. Various foods
were claimed to promote natural sleep in babies, and to lessen the mother's
fatique, too, if she drank or ate them during pregnancy and lactation.(3)
It is unfortunate that the term "soothing" has become such strong concept in
baby care, including for newborns, linked with the implication that the baby
will be "soothed" out of the mother's arms and in a separate sleep space -
when what the baby needs is to "graze" at the breast, for comfort and for
milk. (My own saying on this, for decades, has been: "If in doubt, FEED.")
Virginia
Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA, GradDip Counselling
Honorary Research Fellow
School of HPRC
The University of Queensland, QLD 4072
Australia
References
1) Phillips V [Thorley V]. Children in early-Victorian England: infant
feeding in literature and society. J Trop Pediatr Envir Child Health (Aug
1978). [Contains extensive references.]
2) Uglow J. The lunar men (London: Faber & Faber, 2002): 273,310.
3) Just a few examples are Benger's Food ad, Brisbane Courier, 10 March
1932, p. 20; Robinson's Groats ad, Woman's Mirror, 26 August 1930, p. 29;
numerous Ovaltine ads and ads for Gripe Water (colic drops).
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