View report page

24
children referred by the Assistant School Health
Officers has remained at about the same level.
One of the biggest changes which has taken place
in infant feeding within recent years is the virtual
abandonment of breast feeding. In the majority of
cases, natural feeding has stopped by the first month:
a few babies continue till three months are over, but
it is a rarity to find a mother who goes on after
that. And this, in spite of many women's sincere
desire to nurse their babies themselves. The phenomenon
has occurred over the whole of Western Europe and the
U.S.A : it is only in the backward peasant countries
of the world that breast-feeding is carried on as
nature meant it to be, till the baby is able to deal
with solid food.
The causes of the break down of this physiological
function have so far defied analysis: it remains unique,
and the failure defies all attempts to put it right.
Doctors are helpless when the breast runs dry. The
trouble seems to lie deep in our present culture, and by
the time it shows itself in failing lactation, it is
long past cure. One speculation, which has as good a
chance as any other of being right, starts with the
observation that it is no longer thought decent to
breast-feed a baby in public. Before the first world
war, it was commonplace to see a woman nursing her baby
in a train, in a park, even on her own doorstep. It
followed that young girls grew up familiar with the act,
and took it in their stride when they became mothers
themselves Nowadays, breast feeding in public offends
modesty and children in their impressionable days do
not see it, except when (rarely) they belong to large
families. It has no part in their memories; and when
they play 'mothers and fathers , breast feeding does
not enter. By the time they marry, their breasts have
undergone a spiritual disuse atrophy.
The majority of babies, then, have to be reared on
other milk, administered from a man-made utensil; and
it is a piece of great good fortune for the human race
that technology showed us how to fashion a rubber teat
just as the natural nipple fell into disfavour.
Practically the only milk used in infant feeding in
this country is cows' milk; and in the end it is cows'
milk which is reconstituted from most of the tins of baby
food (this statement does not apply to the minority of