>I was visiting Cynthia's breastfeeding
>art gallery and noticed something in common with many of the painting around
>the same period.  Most are using a cigarette hold of the nipple. This must
>have been very prevalent at this time or so many artist would not have
>painted it.  I wonder if they had lots of sore nipples!  Hmmmm!  Take a look
>at
>http://home.talkcity.com/homepopup.html?url=/SupportSt/ammawell/gallery.html

I couldn't view it because the site was down, but as a fan of the "scissor
hold" (not as pejorative a term, since I'm a fan) when a cradle hold is
used, I was looking for artwork to support my theory a few years ago.  Then
an art historian told me that very likely a lot of the higher-class artists
hadn't really observed breastfeeding, weren't painting from life anyway, and
that hand position often had symbolic meaning and didn't necessarily relate
to reality.  Sigh.

But *some* of the paintings I found sure look as if the artists knew what
they were doing.  And in those paintings, the fingers create a sandwich
parallel to a line through the corners of the baby's mouth, and the middle
finger is well out of the way of the baby's lower jaw.  The position allows
the mom to get her arm out of the space between baby torso and mother torso
and just paste the two together.

I think our big problem with the scissor hold probably arose when we stopped
realizing that the baby's lower jaw needs *lots of room*.  And that
realization was probably lost to us because of bottle-feeding, when the
lower jaw needs hardly any room at all.  When a mom who doesn't understand
tries it, she gets her middle finger way too close to her nipple.

Sue Cox of Australia has a *wonderful* video illustrating a good scissor
hold, and showing how the mother's forearm gets in the way if she tries to
use a cradle hold and cup her breast in a C-hold.  It's available through,
um, whatever NMAA has turned into...  But her biggest point is that there
are lots of different ways to hold a baby successfully for bfing.

Whatever we think of the scissor hold, we'd all agree with that!
--
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC, LLLL  Ithaca, NY
www.wiessinger.baka.com

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