The Milk Factor: The Ideology of Breast-feeding and Post-partum Illnesses, 1750–1850

Abstract

This article discusses how an ideology of the breast-feeding function, explained in terms of contemporary science, influenced the etiology and treatment of post-partum illnesses from 1750 to 1850. Such illnesses were generally attributed to a woman's rejection of Nature's laws. Concerned that a high infant mortality rate was directly connected to the practice of sending infants to hired wet-nurses, doctors couched their advice that mothers nurse their own offspring in contemporary scientific terms, which linked medical problems to a lack of harmony between the fibres and humors of the newborn and those of a stranger's milk. They castigated women who rejected their advice as unnatural mothers and pointed out that using wet-nurses could adversely affect the mother's own well-being as well: a "repressed" milk could wreak havoc on the woman's internal organs when it was not allowed its natural outlet through her breasts to her infant. This view of woman's constitution operating according to laws ordained by Nature contributed to doctors' resistance to accepting contagion as a factor in puerperal fever.