Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950

In the last decade of the 19th century and the first half of this in the United States, the bottle replaced the breast as the initial nourishment of the American baby. This book showed me that the older one gets, the more what one considers current events turn out to be "history." Certainly no one can object to history being set down sooner, as this book has been, than later: it is much more apt to be accurate. In this case Apple has personally interviewed many women who were caught in the misery that occurred when a mother, unable to breast-feed, did not know how or what to feed her hungry infant by bottle. The problems with wet nurses are poignant. Other sources are interviews with physicians who practiced at the time, textbooks of medicine, the major medical journals, women's magazines, government publications, and child-care pamphlets given away by the