Human Milk as Technology and Technologies of Human Milk: Medical Imaginings in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

In 1922, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) undergraduates in mechanical engineering proudly presented their senior thesis, "The Design of a Machine to Powder Milk" (Young and Sutherland 1922).While machines already existed to powder bovine milk (Baumgartner 1920), their machine was novel because it was designed to dry human milk.The aspiring engineers had been recruited by Dr. Lawrence Smith of the Boston Floating Hospital to solve what he considered to be a medical problem, the preservation of human milk.Smith, like others within the newly established specialty of pediatrics, was focused intensely on infant feeding in an effort to reduce infant mortality (Cone 1979, 151-59; Meckel 1998, 40-61).Smith and other Boston physicians collaborated with engineers and industry, enlisting technology to make human milk itself into a technology.These male pediatricians sought to transform the feminine domestic practice of nursing into the commercial production of human milk as a raw material for their new machine. 1They drew upon the knowledge and authority of science (Viner 2002; Apple 1987, 16-18), as well as upon engineering know-how, to promote a decoupling of the nursing dyad of mother and child.In their imaginings, human milk would be improved into a "technology," something made and used by men, in the gendered sense in which that word was just entering popular usage in the early twentieth century (Oldenziel 1999, 14).Dried and mixed with supplements in a powdered formula, human milk would become a therapeutic tool.Disembodied, it would be available to be analyzed, manipulated, and dispensed by trained medical men, rather than by ignorant mothers and wet nurses, the nature of the breast improved by the culture of the bottle.To the extent that any discussion of breastfeeding is "a conversation about femininity," these doctors imagined inverting the gender valence of the conversation, replacing the humAn miLK As TeChnOLOgY And TeChnOLOgies OF humAn miLK: mediCAL imAginings in The eArLY TWenTieTh-CenTurY uniTed sTATes

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