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 *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html