Nikki, those are good points. Add to that, the fact that not-breastfeeding, 
or giving other foods from a very early age, along with breastfeeding, are 
very old practices. Families or the people around them have experience of 
artificially feeding babies, often going back generations.  I started out my 
research in history, with a study of practices in 19th-century England, 
believing that before World War I or before 1900, there was a golden age 
when "everybody" breastfed. How wrong I was! What I found, and my training 
in scientific method, resulted in my discarding of my original hypothesis 
and following the evidence. Artificial feeding was a common practice in 
late-19th-century and early-20th-century England, including among the 
lower-middle classes in cities and the rural poor, and others (1).

Many proprietary foods, both suitable and unsuitable, were advertised for 
infant feeding in England and Australia in the 19th century and the early 
decades of the 20th century, some of them advertised "for infants, invalids 
and the aged". These ads were "in the face" of anyone who read women's 
magazines and other publications, or looked at posters. Families, as well as 
mothers, were aware of them.  A history of Glaxo by two historian states 
that when that product, a dried cow's milk from New Zealand specifically 
marketed for babies, came on the market in 1906 in London, it was up against 
300 competitors.

I have yet to find a golden age when breastfeeding was universal across a 
society. In some times and places, there were sections of the community 
which largely breastfed, or which largely didn't, with different practices 
co-existing. Sometimes breastfed babies were started relatively late on 
solids (and pappy ones low in iron and vitamins at that), while other babies 
were receiving animal milk or mixtures of cereal and liquid by bottle or pap 
boat, dibs and dabs of what the family was eating from an early age, and 
other babies simply weren't breastfed. We hear more about the families of 
the class who wrote and left records. Arrowroot, either as flour (1) or from 
crushed milk arrowroot biscuits, was one of the substances fed by bottle in 
various places. (This is in my unpublished PhD thesis on the 20th century in 
Australia.)

When infant were wet-nursed, the conditions of the practice differed 
according to the location of the work (in the employer's home, her own home, 
or an institution) and whether it was a country with regulations. However, 
in England and in one city in Australia (Melbourne) the wet-nurse was often 
recruited directly from a lying-in hospital, employers almost always did not 
accept her own baby, and child minders and baby farmers would refuse to 
accept her newborn unless weaned. So for each baby breastfed by a wet-nurse, 
another baby (her own) was artificially fed, often on cheap, poor quality 
food. Shurlee Swain has published three articles from her studies of this 
situation in late-19th-century Melbourne (2).

Valerie Fildes in her Breasts, Bottles & Babies, described a high prevalence 
of artificial feeding (not-breastfeeding) in pre-inductrial Europe in parts 
of what is now Germany and in other locations from the northern Italy to 
Iceland. Infants were "rarely or never breastfed" (pp. 264-265). A woman who 
dared to breastfeed in parts of Bavaria faced social ostracism by other 
women and her husband for such appalling behaviour. Fildes speculates that 
climate was a further factor in the survival of hand-reared infants (3). I 
have sighted other sources, including on earlier periods, but my specific 
areas of expertise are 19th-century and 20th century. Historian F.E. Smith 
described the practice in England up till about 1829 of avoiding use of 
colostrum (considered bad milk) and giving butter with brandy or beer 
(depending on income) to purge the meconium (4)

Use of opiates for infants, cheaply available in the 19th century, have been 
decribed by various sources, including by me (1). People actually saw them 
as benign (in soothing syrups) or even beneficial (the belief they would 
strengthen infants' hearts).

I could write a great deal more, but this post would end up book length! 
Some references are below.

Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA
Honorary Research Fellow
School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics
The University of Queensland, QLD 4072
Australia
email: [log in to unmask]

References:
1) Phillips, Virginia [Virginia Thorley]. Children in early Victorian 
England: infant feeding in literature and society, 1837-1857. J Trop Pediatr 
Envir Child Health 1978 (Aug); 24(4): 158-166.
2) Swain, Shurlee, Birth and death in a new land: attitudes to infant death 
in colonial Australia. History of the Family 2010; 15, 1: 25-33.
3) Fildes, Valerie. Breasts, Bottles & Babies.... Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press, 1986.
4) Smith, FE. The people's health. London: Croom Helm, 1979.

>Nikki Lee wrote:
> Heather wonders about people discouraging breastfeeding despite the fact
> that many many babies died as the consequence of not breastfeeding. She
> wonders why humans would choose a course of action not compatible with
> survival.
>
> This trait is part of us; look at what humans are doing to the air and
> water and soil. We are the only species to foul our own nest. Feeding our
> babies the wrong thing is another manifestation of this trait to do
> ourselves in.

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