Norma - very interesting story.  It reminds me of a conversation I had with
my husband's grandmother a few years ago, just before she died.  She was in
her mid-80s.  She always saw me breastfeeding my boys and just delighted in
watching my voracious little nursers.  She looked at me one day with the
saddest face and she said, "I couldn't breastfeed my first baby.  The doctor
told me that my milk had no food value.  There was no nutrition in my milk
so I had to give him a bottle."  (I don't know what she actually put in the
bottle, but I'm sure it was a concoction similar to ones that have been
mentioned here - this was somewhere right around 1940.)  Anyway... it just
absolutely broke my heart to hear her talk about this - more than 60 years
later she still felt the pain of being "unable" to nurse her baby.  If I
could have gone back in time and given her doctor a piece of my mind, I
surely would have!  It saddens me greatly to consider the vast numbers of
women and infants who had this experience so brutally taken from them!

Christina Harris, RN
Seattle, WA

On 5/28/07, Norma Ritter wrote:
>
> OOOOH!
> I have a MUCH better excuse than that !
> I was fed a mixture of National Dried Milk, sugar and water. I
> remember my mother making up a similar formula for my baby sister. The
> 4% fat dried milk came in a tall blue can. Funny the things we
> remember, isn't it?
> My mother did try to nurse us, but the information she was given was
> woefully inaccurate. She was kept in the hospital for 10 days, babies
> were only brought out of the nursery for 30 mins every four hours, and
> after being allowed to nurse for five minutes each side were *topped
> up* by the nursery staff. No wonder she didn't have enough milk. Both
> my sister and I suffered through many ear infections at a time when
> penicillin was in short supply in England, the late 1940s, when we
> still had food rationing too, and my sister became partially deaf.
>
> sign me old as dirt :)
> norma, the expat Brit.

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