Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Women and Health Cultural and Social Perspectives)

Rating:
Summary: extremely boring, could not finish it, loaded with dry facts
Review: I was very disappointed in this book. As a breastfeeding counselor I have a personal interest in the history of infant feeding in America. I truly am interested in how and why Americans got away from breastfeeding in the early 1900s.

I found the book extremely boring and could not finish it. There is no introduction and the book lacks a general logical sequential flow. I found it difficult to hold my interest, as I had no sense of where the author was going with this book. The writing is very dry and only the very dedicated reader would read it through to the end. I wondered what the authors' overall opinions are. Why did she want to write this book? What is the broad summary of the books' content? What are her opinions after doing all this research and writing this book? It reads like a long string of facts rather than having a story-telling type of style. It also lacks the authors' opinion.

Before I began reading this book, I was perplexed by the title. I felt that the title implies is if the baby is not breastfed the baby will die. Since we are living in the present day, I wondered if the author was implying that a non-breastfed baby born now would die if not breastfed; that was my first impression. I read ahead to find out that the title is based on an early 1900s public health dept. campaign to promote breastfeeding and discourage feeding baby cow milk supplements in lieu of breastmilk. This was at a time when the shipping and storage conditions of cow milk were so poor that much of the cow milk that was available to parents to feed their babies was high in bacteria that resulted in many babies becoming ill and with large numbers dying because of the infection. It should also be noted that this campaign that said, 'Don't kill your baby' also encouraged the infant not to smoke cigars and from drinking beer. On page 125 the poster ad-campaign image is given and it advises that parents avoid 'meat, bread, potatoes, fruit, sweets, coffee, tea, beer, etc. and avoid the dread summer complaint'. The image also includes what looks to me like a cigar. The promotion side of the ad states 'mothers milk is best of all, lots of cool bottled water to drink, clean milk (properly prepared) from a clean bottle give only these and a baby will keep well'. I found the image and the message very bizarre! I can understand wanting to reduce infant mortality but this campaign recommending against not giving a cigar and beer to a newborn'very strange! Yet the ad was not being extremist in recommending only breastfeeding, they had instructions for bottle feeding of 'clean milk''very strange, as we all know, bacteria are invisible to the human eye and how could parents know which milk was not-tainted vs. tainted? The fact that the title of the book would be pulled from that bizarre ad campaign makes me question the entire books' worth.

This is a documentation of the Chicago area's public health department's efforts to promote breastfeeding in the 20th century and the negative impact on not breastfeeding (i.e. increased infant mortality). There are loads of references and the author clearly did spend a lot of time researching and documenting her findings, for that reason I will grant this book 2 stars instead of 1.

Rating:
Summary: Great history og public health and Chicago
Review: This book was very interesting. It covers not only breastfeeding in Chicago, but the history of the public health movement and its effects on peoples lives.

Rating:
Summary: Great history og public health and Chicago
Review: This book was very interesting. It covers not only breastfeeding in Chicago, but the history of the public health movement and its effects on peoples lives.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent history of public health and breast feeding
Review: This is really a wonderful book. As a parent and someone interested in health in general, I learned a lot. First off, the research behind the book is incredible: the author has combed diaries, old magazines and tons of public records to reconstruct what life was like for women and families at the turn of the century. You really get a feel for the pressures that women were under from society, from changes in culture, from advances in medicine. Even though it's a complicated story, Wolf has broken it down into easy-to-understand chapters. There's a chapter devoted, for example, to the urban milk supply, and how the absolutely filthy conditions in which milk was brought from the country to the city contributed to the dramatically high infant-mortality rate. There's a chapter on wet nurses -- a fascinating story in and of itself as it describes how some women were forced by poverty to sacrifice the health and well-being of their very own children just so they could get a job nursing the baby of a more well-to-do mother.

One of the most eye-opening lessons from the book is that public health reformers who were so keenly interested in bettering the quality of the milk supply inadvertently contributed to the popularity of formula feeding. Mothers were turning to artificial feeding for a whole array of social reasons, but in doing so, were exposing their infants to formulas created with spoiled, rancid and contaminated milk. Hence reformers, desperate to save lives, pushed both breast feeding and reforms to clean the milk supply. They achieved their goal of a cleaner milk supply (another fascinating story that Wolf covers in-depth) but, in the process, inadvertently made artificial milk a more accetable alternative to breast milk -- just another example of a well-intentioned public policy gone awry.

This is a book for people who really want to understand why attitudes toward breast feeding changed in this country and why bottle-feeding has become the norm. I never could understand why so many women bottle-feed -- when breastfeeding seems obviously like the better, healthier choice -- until I read this book. I'm afraid that many mothers simply don't give enough thought to their decisions about breastfeeding. But clearly the author of this book has given the subject a huge amount of thought -- and can all be glad that she did. This is a really powerful and well-researched contribution to what we know today about attitudes toward breast feeding both yesterday and today.