---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Virginia Thorley <[log in to unmask]>m
Date: Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 1:09 PM
Subject: what feed intolerances to check for after dairy and soy - corn meal
To: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]


Good points about corn, Wendy. It's not only in Mexican culture.
Historically, in the 10th century infants in England and Australia who
weren't breastfeed - and many who were allegedly breastfed, including by a
wet-nurse - were fed on cereal-based kitchen products, such as corn, and
also on cooked concoctions of bread (bread-and-milk, bread boiled up with
cow's milk and sugar). It was what the poor and also the lower middle
classes used. (Cheadle, 1894; Thorley, unpub, 2015). In Australia,
cornflour (maize meal) was sold as "Maizena", certainly in the 1860s-1870s
and beyond.  This corn product was frequently mentioned, as an unsuitable
food, in coroner's inquest into deaths of infants boarded out while their
impoverished mothers worked (Thorley, unpub, 2015).
Arrowroot - not a cereal, but a rhizome -  became a common infant feeding,
from birth, in the 1890s and into the 20th century in Australia, in the
form of 'milk arrowroot biscuits' which were crushed and mixed with boiling
water, and then fed by bottle. There were several brands, but one
dominated. After 1905/1906, the recipe given in the advertisements for
feeding to the youngest babies included half water and half cow's milk,
instead of just the water.
Anyone looking to advertisements to find out what was given to
artificially-fed babies (or mixed-fed  babies) will not find a balanced and
accurate picture as it was the various patent foods for infants (or 'for
infants, invalids and the aged') that were advertised. Ordinary household
substances in people's kitchens that were commonly used to feed babies are
missing from this kind of source. These included cornflour, arrowroot,
bread, and sweetened condensed milk, as well as cow's milk (of varying
quality and cleanliness) from local dairies.
I'm currently working on a study which includes what babies were given if
reared 'by hand' in the Australian colonies. Infants in the care of cheap
wet-nurses in poor suburbs were not necessarily exclusively breastfed (or
breastfed at all), as post mortem examination of stomach contents reveal.
(The ones who were mostly breastfeed would have been less likely to show up
inquests into infant deaths.) Others have found that 'wet-nurses' in
late-19th-century France, too, may or may not have breastfeed, depending on
local custom, and the cheaper ones often didn't.
Sorry to digress, when I meant only to comment on the common use of
cornflour (maize meal) by Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic populations of
England and Australia, at least by the poorer people.
Virginia

Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, MA, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA
Historian of Medicine.
Ipswich, Queensland

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