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Mon, 9 Mar 1998 07:53:40 +0000 |
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After I posted the message on rabies, where I mentioned that you cannot
breastfeed after death (sorry, Val, to have taken advantage of a typo),
I remembered a story I heard in Argentina.
In 1974 when I was hitching around that country, I saw little shrines
all over the country surrounded by bottles of water, often hundreds of
them. The truck drivers used to stop and put them there. The shrines
were to the "Difunta Correa", which means, literally, the dead runner
(female) and she was considered a patron saint of truck drivers.
The story is that a woman left San Juan (Argentina) with her baby to
find her husband who had gone to another area to work. She had to cross
the desert and died of thirst on the way. When they found the mother,
they also found the baby *alive*, because he had continued nursing at
her breast.
Jack Newman, MD, FRCPC
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