On an historical note - When I was a student nurse at a prestigious New York City medical center in the mid-1960's, our infant patients were fed evaporated milk. According to my lecture notes, solid foods were to be started at 1 month of age. Orange juice was introduced at 2-3 weeks, egg yolks by 3-5 months. We were taught that by 6 months of age a baby needed to have become familiar with the whole range of tastes and textures of all foods, or would never learn to eat properly afterwards. Six months was the age to wean from pureed to chopped foods. So we dutifully persisted in spooning the baby food back into the little mouths as quickly as it was spit out. I shudder to think of the wasted time and effort, the emotional damage to the babies, and the allergies we may have unwittingly precipitated. I also remember that on an OB ward of about 32 beds, only one new mother made any attempt to breastfeed. The curtains were drawn around her bed for the feedings. The rule was, no feeding for any baby for 12 hours, then water in a bottle to be sure there was no esophageal atresia present, then a schedule of a few minutes per breast every 4 hours. I quote from the patient care booklet (which I still have, so I am not remembering this wrong!): "...In order to accustom your nipples to nursing, the feeding periods are gradually lengthened. Let your baby nurse 5 minutes at each feeding period the first three days; 10 minutes the following three days; and 15 to 20 minutes thereafter. The screens are drawn back to make it possible for you to see the clock and time the period of actual sucking. The usual plan is to use one breast at a feeding, alternating so that each breast is nursed every eight hours. In 8 or 10 minutes the baby will obtain all the milk he is going to get, but he needs the rest of the time for satisfaction from sucking...." We were taught that beer was good for increasing a mother's milk supply, and that smoking posed no harm to a nursing baby. Breasts were bound up in a binder during the period of engorgement. Nipples were washed with soap and water. Karen Pryor's book, "Nursing Your Baby," was already out, and I read it with great interest, wondering why there were so many differences between her advice and the hospital's protocols. I wonder which of the pieces of advice we give today will seem equally as ineffective or detrimental to us 30 years from now? I hope we will be increasingly able to document that the suggestions we give do really work. In addition, I hope all of us are better able to use our common sense these days. If the baby spits it out, there is probably a good reason. Nature has evolved a good system over thousands of years, and it is clear to me now that 1 month old babies were never meant to eat cereal, vegetables and fruit. As a student nurse I suspected that, but wasn't confident enough to challenge my teachers any further. I was already in enough trouble by then with the other questions I raised, like why fathers were banned from the delivery room. Anne Altshuler, RN, MS, IBCLC and LLL Leader in Madison, WI