Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breast-feeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and Decline of Breast-feeding in 19th and 20th Centuries By Jacqueline H. Wolf (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2001) (290 pages; $64.95 cloth; $24.95 paper) Jacqueline Wolf's Don't Kill Your Baby relates sad history of women's switch from breast to bottle-feeding in United States. Wolf argues that of all classes, not physicians, instigated move from breast to bottle as they responded to economic pressures, conflicts rooted in class disparities, and changing views related to time management, sex, and marriage. Wolf's study reports that switch from breast to bottle-feeding occurred during a period in which babies were dying of infant diarrheal disease in epidemic numbers in summer months. Her book describes role that contaminated milk played in high rates of infant mortality from such diarrheal disease. Wolf describes dangers of a contaminated milk supply before mandated pasteurization and establishment of government standards for collection, transport, and bottling of milk. She also provides insight into political struggle between farmers and public health officials that pitted profit against public health. Her chapters on commercialization of infant feeding and business of selling human milk substitutes in form of cow's milk and artificial infant foods further develop role of profit in switch from breast to bottle-feeding of infants. Finally, Wolf does an excellent job explicating process through which male pediatricians displaced as managers of infant feeding. Wolf is at her best when she explores history of wet nursing during this period, showing how class divisions created a situation in which poor women's babies died so that better off children could live. She tells poignant stories of poor wet nurses forced to place their own babies in institutions where they were artificially fed and frequently perished, while wet nurses' abundant milk supply succored other women's children. Wolf's thesis that themselves drove move away from breast-feeding centers around rancor such mothers felt toward wet nurses: fact that wet-nurses were far below mothers' own middle-class station may have driven feeling that their function, Breast-feeding, was also below middle-class mothers' station. Wolf acknowledged other historians' answers to question of why chose not to breast-feed their babies in face of public health campaigns telling them it was best. Sydney Halpern,1 for example, found answer in move toward pediatric specialization and professionalization. Halpern quotes Edwards A. Park, a past chair of pediatrics at both Yale and Johns Hopkins, who called medical development of late 19th century percentage feeding, a complex method that required physician prescription and ongoing oversight and adjustment, the very Eden of Pediatrics where skill was most needed and pediatricians reigned alone and supreme2 In fact, first two national organizations for specialty of pediatrics were founded at same time physicians were proposing complicated methods of preparing artificial infant formulas. Wolf, however, prefers to argue that women initiated move from breast to bottle as they embraced complex social, cultural, economic, and intellectual change concomitant with urbanization ... (p. 5). She does acknowledge that women's complaints of poor breast milk supply influenced pediatricians' leap into managing motherhood and infant feeding. She also addresses way pediatricians used managing of infant feeding in their quest for collegial recognition of their specialty. All same, Wolf does not convince this reviewer when she concludes that were cogs that turned wheel of change in infant feeding patterns. In making her case that women's needs, anxieties, attitudes, and self images ensured predominance of artificial food (p. …

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