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

Abstract

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.