Pamela Morrison asked:

'Julie writes, "As a former home-visiting nurse to parents of newborns, I
can testify that giving a free can or two of formula at each visit was a
large part of my function.  Mind you, if this wasn't done, many parents
wouldn't accept services, and some of these babies wouldn't have been
fed...period."

 

'This is shocking.  I should stress that I'm only citing Julie's words as
just one more example of similar statements I've heard to defend provision
of free formula.  Colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic have told me that
if free formula wasn't available, then parents would feed their babies
ordinary cow's milk, or coca cola, or almost any other unsuitable liquid -
deliberately.  Can it be true?  Does this really happen??'

 

Hi Pam and Julie

This has been happening for many, many years.  Parents with low resources
and poor knowledge of nutrition were bottle-feeding their babies with high
volumes of low-nutrient feeds, which "looked milky" in London in the 1880s.
These were lower-middle-class families, e.g. with small family-run shops.
Some infants were prematurely weaned onto "farinaceous" (cereal) foods,
which included baked flour, oatmeal, barley, sago, and rice, without any
animal milk, and arrowroot flour and cornflour (maize flour) mixed with
water.  Arrowroot, by the way, is not a cereal, but a rhizome.  Homemade
"beef tea", a food for invalids, was also used for artificial feeding of
babies, despite lack of enough calories, protein, etc.  My source is a
textbook on artificial feeding, based on a series of lectures given by W.B.
Cheadle in the 1880s and published in 1894, which I cited in my 1978 article
(under my former surname) in the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics &
Environmental Child Health. (I included Cheadle's information, even though
it was later than the period I covered, as these practices were not new.)

 

Cheadle wrote: "These substances are largely given - especially cornflour -
chiefly by the poor; possibly because they make a smooth gelatinous fluid
which looks the very ideal of a light digestible food."  He goes on to state
that these babies become thin and pale, but are always hungry and crying for
more.  They consume large volumes, but fade away and die.

Reference:  Phillips V. Children in early Victorian England: Infant feeding
in literature and society. J Trop Pediatr Envir Child Health 1978;
24(4):58-66.

 

In 1906, when the New Zealand-based company, Glaxo, began making a cow's
milk-based dried food for babies to market in London, the Glaxo history
reports that they had to compete against 300 (yes, that is 300) other
products that were marketed as suitable food for babies.  Many of these,
from advertisements I have seen from the late-19th/early-20th centuries,
were cereal-based, which may or may not have had animal milk added,
depending on the product and instructions.  Others were brands of sweetened,
condensed (cow's) milk.

 

In Australia, advertisements in the 1900-1905 period for Arnott's Milk
Arrowroot Biscuits, "the children's food", gave directions for preparing the
food for very young infants, to be ground up and fed through the long-tubed
bottle then common.  Boiled water was to be added, but the recipe expressly
said *not* to add (cow's) milk as the biscuits had some of this included in
the ingredients. Babies would have received a lot of calories for very
little animal protein.  A year or so later, the recipe advised adding equal
water and cow's milk.  The advertisements included testimonials from mothers
who had fed their babies on this food "from birth" or "from 3 weeks" and
other young ages.  The food was advertised as a baby "fattener", and
pictures of fat babies were included in the ads.  Later, the company
promoted the biscuits for when a baby was eating from a bowl and for snacks
and school lunches, or for adults.

 

Anecdotally (as I don't have the references) I have read of low-income
parents in various developing countries, who have been seduced by the fad of
artificial feeding, but don't have the money to buy enough of the commercial
product for the month, and so stretch it by diluting it - as long as it
looks "milky".

 

 

Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA 

Lactation Consultant

Cultural Historian of the History of Medicine

Brisbane, Qld, Australia 

E: [log in to unmask] 

 

 


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