~~~~~~~~~~~
On Sun, 1 May 2005 Darillyn Starr wrote:

> I have one thought about why some cultures might have gotten to the point
of
not breastfeeding their babies, as a general rule.  I wonder if high infant
mortality rates resulted in women attempting to protect themselves from
grief by not getting attached to their babies, in the first place.  Of
course the practice of artificial feeding greatly increased the mortality
rates, but individual cultures often hang onto ideas, despite glaring
physical evidence of the fallacy of them (including modern Western
cultures).  Also, once a practice has become common, people often perpetuate
it with no idea of how, or why, it ever started in the first place. I
suspect that religious beliefs would have played a part in the establishment
of a practice of artificial infant feeding, too, if people believed in
predestination and therefore did not feel like anything they did affected
whether or not a baby survived.  I would be willing to bet that there were
many young mothers who had the instinct to want to breastfeed their babies
and had to be dissuaded from doing so.

> I would love to hear more about this topic, including such practices as
more
wealthy women having their babies breastfed by others, and also the belief
that colostrum was poisonous.

Darillyn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A range of different possible cultural factors influencing mothers to avoid
breastfeeding has been raised on this list in the last few days.  As I see
it, from my reading and from my own ongoing research, reasons were complex
and not constant across time.  Factors could also differ between different
locations.

Rather than comment on the broad sweep of the question, I just want to say
that our era is not the only one where the lower socio-economic groups were
likely to use artificial feeding. I don't have time to look back further
than this and check texts, but in late-19th-century England there was
concern about the incidence of rickets and failure to thrive in the children
of the less affluent, e.g. families with small shops and "the poor".  W.B.
Cheadle described the effects of faulty hand-feeding (artificial feeding) in
his series of 1887 lectures on artificial feeding for the post-graduate
course at St Mary's Hospital and the Hospitla for Sick Children in Great
Ormond Street, London, and published them later. Many of these feedings were
cereal-based and very deficient (cornflour was a great favourite, as were
baked flour and oatmeal) or arrowroot (not a cereal but a rhyzome).  Some of
these babies took in large volumes of these foods, but didn't grow or were
wasting because of low caloric values.   [See: Cheadle WB. Principles and
Conditions of Artificial feeding of infants. London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1894.] I guess the poor and the middle-class shopkeepers didn't have time to
prepare time-consuming recipes for foods such as oat jelly or cereal jelly,
to which cream might be added, and few people without staff (a nurse-maid at
least) would have taken the many hours to make up the"bread jelly" recipe of
a Dr Churchill of Dublin, to which thin cream and white sugare were added
before feeding.  (Cheadle, pp. 84-85.)  (As Cheadle's book is hard to find,
see also the reference, below, to my 1978 publication under my previous
surname, Phillips.)

Concurrently with these practices, there was a large number of "patent"
foods on the market, in England and Australia, mostly cereal-based (even if
cow's milk were to be added).  These were advertised for "infants and
invalids" and used as weaning foods or sometimes for younger babies.
Additionally, there was the cow's milk delivered from dairies to city homes,
the safety of which was the topic of much public-health writing (in a number
of countries).

Early in the 20th century, in Britain, there was a government campaign to
increase breastfeeding among the poor because the low height of military
recruits at the lowest rank (private), usually recruited from the poorer
classes.  Because artificial feeding had become so common in this class when
these recruits were infants, and the foods given them so lacking in
nutrition (as also described by Cheadle), their poor growth had led to
shorter adult heights.  Sadly, it seems to have been the need for sturdy
soldiers, rather than humanitarian concerns, that spurred this particular
campaign.  I don't have a class breakdown on the early-20th-century
Australian material I'm looking at the the moment, e.g. on mothers
artficially feeding with calorie-deficient mixtures (again, baked flour was
among them) or high-calorie "baby fatteners".  (At this stage of research
and writing I'm drowning in a sea of primary material.)  It is worth
mentioning, however, that the Sydney public health measures begun in 1904 by
Dr .G. Armstrong to foster breastfeeding, with home visits and instruction
by a nurse, were directed at very poor mothers in the inner-Sydney slums.

Numerous sources have described the avoidance of colostrum in a number of
East Asian cultures and African cultures, with breastfeeding beginning after
the milk comes in. Yet, according to FE Smith (the People's Health. London:
Croom Helm, 1979), avoidance of colostrum was common in England early in
the19th century and was still happening up till the late-1820s.  Instead of
colostrum, foods such as butter + alcohol were given to newborns to purge
the meconium. (Income will give you an idea of whether butter + brandy, or
butter + beer, were used.)  This custom changed, as customs do, and so is
not one we associate with the British Isles.

I'd better stop here or this message will be too long.  Otherwise I could go
back further and discuss the effects of the gang system of rural labour on
the feeding of early-Victorian infants of the rural poor in England, and the
effects of industrialisation.  [See: Phillips V. Children in earlyVictorian
England: Infant feeding in literature and scoiety. J Trop Pediatr envir
Child Health 1978;24(4):158-166.] To summarise:  Artificial feeding, often
calorie deficient, was widely practised by the poor at times in the past,
instead of breastfeeding.  Reasons could be complex - work commitments,
ignorance, custom, lack of confidence in the ability of the body to produce
plentiful milk.

A further thought - don't underrate the power of custom in a culture, of
what is perceived as the norm from time to time.  Customs that are
deleterious continue because they are considered normal after long use, or
because (in the case of foot-binding in pre-1911 China and female genital
mutilation in parts of Africa) mothers fear their daughters won't be
marriable.  I suspect that perceptions of "normal" have a lot to do with the
prevalence and continuance of artificial feeding in some industrialised
countries today, and the postnatal hospital practices.

Virginia Thorley, OAM, MA, IBCLC
Private practice lactation consultant;
Cultural historian working in the history of medicine;
PhD candidate, University of Queensland, St Lucia
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
email: [log in to unmask]

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