Measuring Mamma's Milk

This history of breast-feeding ideas and practices in Italy—set against the economy, society, demography, and health-care practices of that country over the past two centuries—possesses the indubitable heuristic value of research combining anthropological and historical investigation. To discover the cultural changes in the conception of motherhood and infant care, as well as the role played by medicine in this process, Elizabeth Whitaker asks how it happened that modern societies abandoned the traditional and evolutionarily adaptive practices, replacing them with artificial methods suggested by the new hygiene doctrine that were believed to be more effective (and were indeed effective in controlling morbidity and mortality due to infectious diseases). Assuming the physiological and anthropological knowledge of the mechanisms underlying maternity, she argues that the new methods of child rearing (including the imposition of feeding schedules, and nursing techniques that separated the child from the mother) would seem to lead to hardship, and even to new risk of disease

Breast feeding · Doctrine · Health care · Hygiene · Medicalization · Political science · Psychiatry · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine · Pediatrics