Infant and Child Nutrition Worldwide

Issues and Perspectives

Frank Falkner

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000159714
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pediatric Medicine

This volume provides a contemporary and historical overview of infant nutrition in Europe, North America, and the Third World. It emphasizes the important role that good nutrition, appropriate health care, and a caring environment play in promoting healthy physical and social growth in children. Issues covered include breast feeding, maternal undernutrition and reproductive performance, weaning, and the social and pyschological factors of breast feeding. The book will serve as an excellent guide for nutritionists, pediatricians, health professionals and others involved in child welfare worldwide.

1

Breast-Feeding Practices During Industrialisation 1800–1919¹

Valerie Fildes

ESRC Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure, Cambridge, England

In pre-industrial European and colonial society, infant feeding practices remained relatively unchanged for many centuries. In most regions virtually all children were breast-fed, either by their mother or by a wet nurse (Fildes, 1986). Wealthy mothers who did not wish to breast-feed paid a married woman of lower social status to suckle their infants, either in the family home or, more usually, in the nurse’s home. Abandoned children, bastards and orphans were also wet nursed, by the poor married women employed by foundling hospitals and municipal and parish authorities. A proportion of these disadvantaged infants, however, were artificially fed, either due to a shortage of wet nurses or because the authorities attempted to save money by employing dry nurses instead (Fildes, 1986; Fildes, 1988). Artificial feeding was universally accepted to be dangerous to life and, apart from these instances, was normally only employed in cases of necessity, such as where prematurity or congenital deformities made suckling impossible, or when a wet nurse could not be employed because the infant had syphilis (Fildes, 1986). There were also some clearly-defined regions in northern Europe where, by tradition, children were rarely or never breast-fed although the original reasons for this were lost in time. In addition, some infants were artificially fed when certain socially-privileged groups fleetingly experimented with feeding methods, but the vast majority of infants were not affected by these (Fildes, 1986). The duration of breast-feeding varied from 9–12 months in some areas to 2–3 years in others but most children were suckled, usually on demand, for at a year (Fildes, 1986; Fildes, 1988; Liestøl et al., 1988; Lithell, 1981; Rollet, 1981). This chapter will discuss how these breast-feeding practices were affected by industrialisation.

The industrial revolution began in England in the mid-18th century (Briggs, 1983). During the 19th century, although beginning at different times in different regions, many parts of Europe, North America and Australasia became increasingly mechanised and urbanised and, by the end of the first world war, a majority of the people in these continents were living in an industrialised society. The immense changes in lifestyle which occurred during this transition had a significant influence on infant feeding practices. Although some regions retained traditional habits until the mid-20th century, by the 1920s the feeding of most children was radically different from that of babies born a hundred years earlier (Apple, 1987; Cone, 1976; Fildes, 1988; Golden, 1984; Lewis, 1980; Kintner, 1985; Sussman, 1982; Van Eekelen, 1984).

Industrialisation involved large numbers of people moving away from their traditional communities to towns and cities and, in place of homebased work, both men and women working for long hours away from the home (Pinchbeck, 1981; Tilly & Scott, 1978). The explosion of the urban population resulted in public health problems, in particular those relating to overcrowding, poor sanitation, and the water and milk supply. Efforts to solve these led to the establishment of the specialty of public health, and the idea of preventing morbidity and mortality, including that of young children (Smith, 1979; Wohl, 1983).

Increasingly better demographic records were kept, particularly national registration of births and deaths and reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Contributors
• 1 Breast Feeding Practices During Industrialisation 1800-1919
• 2 The Geographic Distribution of Malnutrition
• 3 Maternal Undernutrition and Reproductive Performance
• 4 Breast-feeding: An International and Historical Review
• 5 Science and Lactation
• 6 Contemporary Feeding Practices in Infancy and Early Childhood in Developing Countries
• 7 Social and Psychological Factors in Breast-feeding
• 8 Weaning: Why, When and What?
• 9 Development in Infant Nutrition
• 10 The Infant Food Industry as a Partner in Health
• 11 Direct Intervention Programmes to Improve Infant and Child Nutrition