A Vignette of Infant Feeding in the 20th century

I had been thinking about starting this blog when this message was posted on a discussion list. Virginia Thorley, a researcher in this subject, has allowed me to post it here. If you would like to use this material, please contact Virginia at [vgthorley AT optusnet DOT com DOT au]

Dear Lactnetters

It has been fascinating, following the strands on "BF history" (some of which could have been titled "NOT BF history") and "Old enough". I have held off commenting as my research over the years has provided so much information that it is hard to know where to start. Beliefs in the inadequacy of human milk, that it might "fail', and that anything made up in a kitchen or factory had to be as good or better, have been persistent for generations, and your posts are illustrative of that.

A textbook for the artificial feeding of infants, collected in c.1894 from a series of lectures in paediatrics given by a Dr Cheadle in the 1880s, has some fascinating information about what mothers *really* were giving their artificially-fed infants. These included anything that looked milky, e.g. cornflour or arrowroot flour in water. Of course, desptie the huge intake, the babies were deficient in calories and nutrients, and failed to thrive. Oatmeal or baked flour without animal protein were other culprits, described as worse than the patent baby foods. A recipe he mentioned took about 8 hours to prepare and assumed a nursery staff. Cheadle's book would be difficult to find in libraries, but details are in an article I published in 1978 (under my former surname, Phillips), from supervised research I did in 1976. [Phillips V. J Trop Pediatr Envir Child Health 1978 (Aug);24(4):158-166.]

What follows below is only a vignette of infant feeding in the 20th century, mainly in Australia. Space means this is not comprehensive, but it will give you a taste.

"Regularity" and schedules for breastfeeding were advocated by a number of authorities in the early-20th century, but it was 2-hourly at the start and was only stretched ut to 4-hourly a few months later. Some products were advertised as galactogogues (milk-making supplements), which for many years included Lactagol tablets and some tonic foods.

One of my sources (the Glaxo history by R.P.T. Davenport-Hines and Judy Slinn, Cambridge University Press, 1992) mentions that, in London, UK, when the Glaxo brand started in 1906, it was competing against about 300 products sold for artificial feeding of infants. ( I suspect that, as in Australia, many of these products would in fact have been promoted to a broad market of "infants, invalids and the aged", though some products were marketed exclusively for infants.) I don't have a count to provide the number of artificial-feeding products in Australia in the first decade of the 20th C, but there were many. Many of them contained some form of cereal as well as cow's milk powder. The type of feeding bottle used with them was likely to be the widely sold long-tube bottle, so diffiult to clean. There were also many brands of canned condensed milk in Australia, and one of the uses for these was as an infant feeding. Other foods included "baked flour", which took a very long time to prepare, and didn't completely die out for a long time - though the time it took to make probably deterred mothers from making this choice.

Wet nursing? "Wet nurse wanted" ads appeared regularly in the very early 1900s, but petered out. Some specifically sought women whose babies had died. Years later some household management books and other sources still recommended a wet nurse if the mother wasn't breastfeeding, but obtaining a wet nurse was well nigh impossible by the 1920s and '30s.

My mother, who was born in England in 1905 and married later than most women of her generation, told me she was artificially fed from birth, by her mother's choice, and she believes the long-tube bottle was used. She thought she was fed one of the proprietary brands of food. This was in Weymouth in south-west England. She nearly died (pneumonia?) at 4 or 5 months of age and the doctor said he'd come back in he afternoon to write the death certificate. He didn't think the dying baby should be fed, but her father wanted to try something, and the doctor said he could but he didn't think it would make any difference. My grandfather cooked up a traditional food used as a weaning food or as an artificial food - "bread and milk". It consisted of (stale) bread broken up finely, cow's milk, and sugar, and was boiled. (When my mother made it once or twice as a treat for my brother and me when we were school age, we didn't like it.) After being fed on the bread and milk, my mother perked up and survived, and it became a family story that this was a life-saving food. So much so that she received lots of it, and this would have been the main factor in her developing anaemia. As a little girl, she had to have a home-made preparation made of liver, some sort of liver cocktail, that she loathed. To her dying day she rejected my comments that the "bread and milk" diet had been a factor, so strong was the belief that "bread and milk" was wholly beneficial. By the way, although she came from a bottle-feeding family, she was proud that she breastfed me and my brother, on the advice of an elderly English doctor in Australia, who advised delaying weaning till after the tropical summer. So I got 6 months or breastfeeding and my brother got 4 months. She always held the bottle.

To return to early-20th C Australia: Among the products used here for artificial feeding were "milk arrowroot biscuits". Arrowroot is a rhyzome, not a cereal. I have come across other brands, but Arnotts was the market leader and was very savvy about advertising from the 1890s, with parents encouraged to send in pictures of their biscuit-fed babies for use in further ads. Ads in 1900-1905 included recipes for feeding very young infants on the biscuits, with only boiling water added, on the grounds that the biscuits already contained (cow's) milk. By about 1906-7, the recipes in the ads advised using half boiled water and half boiled cow's milk. Over
time, introduction of the biscuits at birth or soon after wasn't mentioned any more, but they were still used by mothers decades later, and it appears they didn't tell the maternal and child health nurses, who didn't approve. (Actually, compliance with the MCH nurses' advice was less than many of the nurses realised, a number of studies having shown that - in Australia - attendance didn't equal compliance.} Some families, as late as the 1950s/'60s, were giving the arrowroot biscuists with cow's milk in a bowl, or as rusks.

In the inter-war years and during and after World War II, the maternal and child health baby clinics preferred home-modified cow's milk (or goat's milk "in the dry west"), over the factory-made products. Lactogen (a brand name bought by Nestle in 1920-21) and Glaxo were the market leaders by the mid-20th C, but nurses interviewed for my earlier research on the post-World War II period said that mothers "couldn't afford" them, and they only recommended these products if the family was more affluent. The duration of breastfeeding was in decline, and "breastfed' usually meant breastfeeding + water bottles + juice + vitamins. New brands of artificial baby milk came onto the Australian market in 1958-59, starting with SMA. Evaporated (cow's) milk became fairly popular in the 1960s here in Australia, as one of the artificial feedings of the time, with the Carnation mother book distributed to new mothers from the hands of the midwives. The Carnation booklet stressed that their product was able to be more individualised than a commercial ABM that came ready made.

I'll stop at 1960. I thought I'd write all this so that it is in the Lactnet Archives, and then if in the future anyone is doing a university assingment or research on these topics, and needs more information, I am willing to be contacted.

Virginia
Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia