The Social and Medical Construction of Lactation Pathology

Abstract

Beginning in the 1880s, many mothers reported breastfeeding difficulties. Doctors blamed the stress of urban life. The "bad" human milk invariably produced by the mammary glands of urban women, some physicians charged, harmed babies as surely as the dirty and adulterated cow's milk common to the late nineteenth-century city. Mothers and pediatricians proved unusually susceptible to believing this allegation. Mothers, just learning about the germ theory of disease and anxious about protecting their babies from unseen microbes, found themselves gratefully relying on "scientific" food rather than on their own, apparently faulty, bodies. And pediatricians no longer had to defend their new specialty. Now they could point to the need for improved artificial food-given women's growing inability to lactate-as one justification for their specialty's existence. Under the influence of these mothers and doctors, the notion that human lactation is an unreliable body function became a cultural truth that has persisted unabated to the present day.

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