Thought you all might find this interesting.

Sincerely,
Andrea

--
Andrea Eastman, MA, CCE, IBCLC
Granville, Ohio
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/8978

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See http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7236/691

BMJ 2000; 320:691 (11 March)

How medicine has changed

Mother's milk

Gordon M Black, physician, Pembroke, Bermuda.

I was due to give a talk entitled "Changes in medicine in 43
years of practice" when I attended the funeral of a patient a few
weeks before the presentation. She was a sweet old lady of 96
years who had borne 10 children, and the church was filled to
capacity there were three generations of her family present.  An
elderly clergyman gave one of the eulogies He related how as a
young boy in the 1920s and 1930s he had been a next door
neighbour of Ma Smith. In those days, he said, "We didn't have
cars, or fridges, or telephones, we never went to the doctor he
didn't have antibiotics or any of the other wonderful medications
they have now, and we didn't have health insurance. We only saw
the doctor for a broken bone or if dying. Doctors in those days
prescribed mustard poultices or the like and Mother knew all
about those. One day I got a sore eye. Mother said it was 'pink
eye' and it needed warm milk applications.  Sometimes we did not
have the basics, and at the time we had no milk, so she sent me
next door to see Ma Smith. I knocked on her door and when she
came I told her my problem. She said, "Look up and hold your eye
open child." I did so and she took out her breast and gave me a
squirt."

Ma Smith's treatment may have been soundly based. Breast milk
contains a range of antimicrobial proteins, including
immunoglobulins, lysozyme, and lactoferrin. Professor John Davis
pointed this out to me 37 years ago, noting that
West Indian mothers at Hammersmith Hospital frequently treated
neonatal sticky eye with breast milk. Roger
Robinson BMJ.

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