Thanks Kate for asking me to weigh in on this matter. I've spent the last
eight years studying the transition from breast to bottle, which I pinpoint
occurred in the late 19th century, not the 1940s and 50s which is the
popular myth.

The first generation of pediatricians, who trained in the 1880s and 1890s,
had a very sophisticated knowledge of breast milk and its immunological
importance. They did experiments feeding human milk to puppies, for example,
and found that, although the poor pups lived, they were unhealthy their
entire lives. These doctors knew that feeding the milk of one species to the
offspring of another portended lifelong health problems. As a result, they
orchestrated all kinds of public health campaigns urging women to
breastfeed. But the social change that came with urbanization-more private
lives without the communal help that women in previous generations had
enjoyed, marriages based on romance rather than economics, people working
outside the home rather than within the household, and the popularity of
scheduling infant feeding prompted by factory work-all conspired to move
women to feeding their infants cows' milk. The latter activity-scheduled
infant feeding-was particularly harmful as it led an entire generation of
women to believe that they did not have enough milk for their babies, which
in turn convinced the medical community that lactation was either a
disappearing function due to human evolution or an invariable side effect of
women's "overcivilization" or "overeducation." Doctors scurried to find
alternatives to cows' milk, which until the 1920s and 1930s was
unpasteurized, unbottled, and invariably spoiled and adulterated. Literally
hundreds of thousands of babies died of diarrhea in the United States
between the early 1890s (when cities started to keep infant mortality
statistics) and the 1920s, due to cows' milk feeding.

It took the generation of pediatricians trained in the 1920s and 1930s,
after cows' milk had been universally pasteurized, to prompt a change in
medical thinking about breast milk. These doctors had never seen babies die
en masse from diarrhea. So-in  contrast to their pediatric teachers who
never stopped arguing that it was folly to hunt for a substitute for breast
milk, this new generation of pediatricians contended that cows were "the
foster mother of the human race" and that while formula was a reliable,
steadfast product, breast milk was notoriously unreliable. Who knows what
women's unreliable bodies were producing? "It might be nothing but water,"
wrote one doctor, in a medical journal no less.

I think we have yet to recover from that change in thinking. Doctors stopped
learning about lactation physiology, breastfeeding management, and the
importance of human milk to human health in medical school more than 80
years ago. Until we make human lactation part of the medical school
curriculum, we will keep on producing doctors ignorant about human
lactation. And until we can provide that training, we won't even have the
faculty in medical schools capable of training medical students about human
lactation. Quite a pickle we're in.

Jackie Wolf


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