The Resurgence of Breastfeeding, 1975–2000

This is a link to a seminar that was held in 2007 where professionals who were linked to breastfeeding in some way got together to discuss it’s history. They chose the year 1975 as a starting point because for some reason breastfeeding rates were at an all time low in the UK though they picked up 5 years later.
This is a long document – I have cut and pasted a couple of snippets from the beginning but if you are interested the whole thing is well worth a read – it includes peoples experiences of the time as well as medical research.

The transcript of a Witness Seminar held by the Wellcome Trust Centre
for the History of Medicine at UCL, London, on 24 April 2007

The Witness Seminar is a particularly specialized form of oral history, where
several people associated with a particular set of circumstances or events are
invited to come together to discuss, debate, and agree or disagree about their
memories.

http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/15855/1/15855.pdf

Starts on page 23

“INTRODUCTION
For millennia, infant feeding was breastfeeding and the nursing mother was idealized
as the source of strength, of power, of family. Before the nineteenth century, infants
denied breast-milk were not likely to survive. Medicine could provide a substitute
for mother’s milk, if absolutely necessary, but artificial feeding was a poor substitute
for breastfeeding. Yet, by the middle of the twentieth century, in many industrialized
countries, the overwhelming majority of infants were bottle-fed.”

“This
Witness Seminar is devoted to what happened to breastfeeding over the last 30
years or so.
There seems to have been an upturn in the incidence of breastfeeding over the
last 25 years, after a steady decline during the first half of the last century. During
this period we have witnessed increasing concern about the declining numbers
of mothers who wished to breastfeed their babies and efforts have been made
to reverse this trend. This has brought together paediatricians, obstetricians,
nutritional scientists, lactational physiologists, public health professionals,
women’s organizations, the church, pressure groups and international agencies
in various combinations and alliances. These efforts have occurred against a
background of the development and promotion of breast-milk substitutes. Infant
formulae have become more refined to resemble human milk, are international
in use and brand-led. A few big companies now control the supply of baby
milks throughout the world.”

“I want to sketch out briefly how I think we reached
what we now probably all agree is a very dismal situation, a state of affairs
where the majority of mothers in this country, and also in parts of the US and
elsewhere, never nursed their babies, had no intention of doing so and were
given little support or help in suckling them, even if they had wished to do
so. Bottle-feeding had become regarded as normal, not just socially, but also
medically, and in the minds of some members of the medical profession, as
better than the breast for mothers and babies.
Let us go back 100 years, to try to identify how such a state of affairs came
about. Before the development of clean and nutritionally balanced human
milk substitutes, not being breastfed during the early months of life was pretty
much a death sentence. The Dublin Lying-in Hospital, for instance, in 1799
records a mortality rate of over 99 per cent in infants who were not suckled by
their mothers.2
By the end of the nineteenth century, knowledge of the nutrient composition
of human and cows’ milk, an understanding of the energy needs of the
newborn, along with recognition of the importance of clean milk with the
introduction of sterilization, hygienic storage, etc., meant that bottle-feeding
not only became possible, but saved lives. The growing employment of young
women in the labour force and their social emancipation meant that many
weaned their babies soon after birth. Feeding babies on artificial milk became
a weapon in the battle to control infant mortality – then around 150 per
thousand live births – and was given added urgency by the need to maintain a
supply of fit young men for the imperial armies of Europe. Efforts to humanize
bovine milk to mimic human milk brought together paediatricians, public
health clinicians, chemists and food technologists.”