The most common version of the 'murder bottle' design that Nina mentions was
the Alexandra Feeder, which my mother thought was the bottle she was fed
from, from birth, in England.
Pictures from the early-20th century, including artwork in magazines, show
very fat babies self-feeding from it. (Fatness in babies was considered
desirable.) The long tube and small, solid nipple on the end were virtually
impossible to clean. Cleaning the device would have been made more difficult
by the refined flours used in baby-feeding products of the time, as some of
the well-known commercial products contained wheaten flour and/or malt. In
Australia, one of the products advertised as a complete infant food, 'from
birth', was ground up ' arrowroot biscuits', to which boiled water was added
(and, later, half boiled water and half cow's milk). The instructions said
to feed it by bottle. There were at least three brands of these biscuits,
with one dominating the market and highly advertised with pictures of fat
babies and toddlers. Arrowroot flour, including in the biscuits, is very
fine and in the 1920s it was criticised for sticking to the teeth. Imagine
how it would have stuck to the inside of the rubber tube in the long-tube
bottles!
The arrowroot biscuits, as a baby 'fattener', gradually went from a
'complete' infant feeding to a weaning food, given the same way as a cereal,
by spoon and bowl. Incidentally, arrowroot isn't a cereal, but a rhizome.
There was a big arrowroot industry in Queensland at the time.
Virginia

Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA 
Brisbane, Qld, Australia 
E: [log in to unmask]

Nina wrote:
At the turn of the last century, a very similar product was dubbed the
'murder bottle'.  They are difficult (impossible?) to clean and present an
unacceptable risk of contamination - to say nothing the deprivation Heather
mentioned.
Nina Berry
Australia
On 25/07/2011, at 6:21 AM, heather wrote:

> http://www.podee.com/products.html

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