Inspired by the reports of the woeful state of BF curriculum content in another health profession, I want to share this with the list.
I am a proud graduate of the University of Washington School of Nursing, class of 1982.
We had a ten week course on general nutrition our first year in which maternal and child nutrition was covered well, in an introductory way.  The same instructor, Bonnie Worthington Roberts, offered an elective course, also ten weeks, solely on maternal-child nutrition.  Inspired by the content in the general (required) course, I signed up.  Twenty years later I have yet to learn anything which overturns the basic knowledge I gained in this course, and I am actively seeking information on BF daily.  It is without a doubt the most useful, and most used, course of my professional education.  Among other things, we were shown the film "Bottle Babies", and Dr. Worthington Roberts still stands out for me as a very strong advocate of practices which protect and promote BF.  We learned the anatomy of the breast, techniques for starting BF successfully, nutritional needs of mothers (pregnancy and lactation) and babies, properties of human milk, political barriers to BF success-- it was an incredible course.  I had my first child a couple of years later and tried out the theories I had learned, and guess what?  they worked!  It helped to give birth in an institution that in 1981 had made a conscious decision not to participate in formula marketing and also had policies which made it easy to succeed at BF (no limit on frequency or duration of feeds from birth, no separation of mother and baby), but I feel what I learned in nursing school was my ballast as a new mother and I have never stopped being grateful for it.
In the mid-80's I moved here, and went to midwifery school a couple of years later.  I had become a volunteer peer counsellor in the meantime, and was the only one in my class who honestly didn't hear anything new in the two hours or so of lecture time we had on BF there.  I was also the only one still BF my 8 month old son, while a third of the class had children of similar ages.  Most of them had weaned them in anticipation of the demands of school.  That just never occurred to me.
Hope I haven't bored anyone with this rose-colored narrative...
Rachel Myr
now blooming where I have been transplanted in Norway, a BF-friendly country which suits me fine

             ***********************************************
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