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Breastfeeding and Health Professionals in Britain, New Zealand and the United States, 1900–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Linda Bryder
Linda Bryder
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand
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Modern medical opinion is almost universally in favour of breastfeeding as the best food for newborn infants. Yet this was not always the case. American social historian Rima Apple has argued convincingly that medical attitudes in the United States undermined breastfeeding in the first half of the twentieth-century. She explains how the concept of “scientific motherhood”, successfully promoted by the medical profession during the first half of the twentieth century, “fostered the acceptance of, when not the wholesale commitment to, bottle feeding under physician-supervision”. In her recent book on breastfeeding in the United States, Jacqueline Wolf argues that while many doctors in the United States supported breastfeeding, they inadvertently undermined it by advocating routine feeding and by providing a viable alternative through milk formulas. Considering the experience of breastfeeding in two further environments, Britain and New Zealand, contributes to the discussion of the role of health professionals in promoting breastfeeding. Doctors in Britain and New Zealand did not promote the move from breast to bottle, as Apple found in America. Nor did they appear to undermine breastfeeding by their advocacy of routine feeding. The decline in breastfeeding occurred later than in America. It coincided with the new fashion for “demand feeding”, and with a new movement to medicalize breastfeeding itself. A study of breastfeeding in different countries and over time indicates that the attitudes and advice of health professionals were significant factors in the success or otherwise of breastfeeding.

Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , 01 April 2005 , pp. 179 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

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2 Jacqueline H Wolf, Don't kill your baby: public health and the decline of breastfeeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2001. See also Jacqueline H Wolf, ‘Don't kill your baby’: feeding infants in Chicago, 1903–1924', J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 1998, 53: 219–53.

3 Richard A Meckel, Save the babies: American public health reform and the prevention of infant mortality 1850–1929, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 57.

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5 Meckel, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 52.

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8 Harold Waller, Clinical studies in lactation, London, William Heinemann, 1938, p. 4.

9 See Deborah Dwork, War is good for babies and other young children: a history of the infant and child welfare movement in England 1898–1918, London, Tavistock Publications, 1987.

10 Cited in New Zealand Department of Health, Annual Report 1907, Appendices of the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR), 1907, H-31, p. viii.

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17New Zealand Herald, 3 Feb. 1908, cited in Bryder, op. cit., note 15 above, p. 6; “nursing” and “suckling” were euphemisms for breastfeeding.

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21 Plunket Society, Annual Report, 1912–13, p. 11. Wet nursing had never been a viable alternative for middle-class women in New Zealand. Just as there was a perennial shortage of domestic servants, so there was a dearth of women for this occupation; neither attracted Maori women. See also Sue Kedgley, Mum's the word: the untold story of motherhood in New Zealand, Auckland, Random House, 1996, p. 11.

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42 Deem, op. cit., note 22 above, pp. 539–56.

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59 O K Orris to H Deem, 17 July 1953, PSA 576.

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61 Gwen Evans to H Deem, 23 July 1953, PSA 576.

62 Plunket nurse to H Deem, 13 July 1953, PSA 576.

63 Kathleen Lee to H Deem, 31 July 1953, PSA 576. Telephones were fairly widespread in 1950s New Zealand.

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65The Weekly News, 6 Feb. 1946.

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76 M I Nicholls to A W S Thompson, 7 July 1954, PSA 580.

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78 M Spencer to Plunket Society President and Council, 18 Dec.1937, PSA 239.

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81 Ibid., p. 32.

82 Grantly Dick Read, Revelation of childbirth: the principles and practice of natural childbirth, London, W Heinemann, Medical Books, 1942, reprinted annually until 1953, latterly as Childbirth without fear. Dick Read officially hyphenated his name in 1958. See also Mary Thomas (ed.), Post-war mothers: childbirth letters to Grantly Dick-Read, 1946–1956, University of Rochester Press, 1997.

83 Dick Read to Mrs Gayle Aiken, 14 June 1950, PP/GDR/D.268, Wellcome Library, Manuscripts and Archives.

84 Kedgley, op. cit., note 21 above, p. 177.

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90 C Anderson Aldrich and Mary M Aldrich, Babies are human beings, New York, Macmillan, 1938, republished in Britain as Understanding your baby, London, Black, 1939, cited in Cathy Urwin and Elaine Sharland, ‘From bodies to minds in childcare literature’, in Roger Cooter (ed.), In the name of the child: health and welfare 1880–1940, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 187–8.

91 C Anderson Aldrich, ‘Science and art in child nourishment’, J. Pediatr., Oct. 1932, 1 (4): 418.

92Mothercraft Training Society Nurses League Magazine, summer 1958, p. 19, reprinted from Nursing Times, 21 March 1958.

93 Katherine Arnup, Education for motherhood: advice for mothers in twentieth century Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1994, p. 99.

94 Modern Mothercraft, Official Handbook, Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, 2nd ed., Dunedin, 1953, p. 63.

95 J C Spence, ‘The encouragement of breast feeding’, Mother and Child, Aug. 1939, 10 (5): 169–72, p. 171.

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99 Plunket Society, Report of Twenty-ninth General Conference, 1948, p.15.

100 Wilson, op. cit., note 98 above, p. 27.

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108 Editorial, Mother and Child, July 1955, 26 (4): 87.

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113 Mary White to Hugh Jolly, 4 May 1976, GC/143/12/2, Wellcome Library, Manuscripts and Archives.

114 Wolf, Don't kill your baby, op. cit., note 2 above, p. 197.

115New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1907, vol. 140, p. 856.

116 Plunket Society, Annual Report 1912–13, p. 11.

117Christchurch Press, 16 Nov. 1962.