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Social History of Medicine Advance Access published online on November 7, 2009
Social History of Medicine, doi:10.1093/shm/hkp058
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

‘Growing Babies’: Defining the Milk Requirements of Infants 1890–1910

Lawrence T. Weaver*

* Samson Gemmell Professor of Child Health, Centre for the History of Medicine and Department of Child Health, University of Glasgow, Division of Developmental Medicine, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Yorkhill Hospitals, Glasgow G3 8SJ, UK. E-mail: lweaver{at}clinmed.gla.ac.uk


  Abstract

How babies should best be fed was a pressing question at a time when infant mortality in many parts of Europe and North America was well above 100 per 1,000 live births, and recognised to be strongly associated with ‘improper feeding’. This paper compares and contrasts three national answers to this question. In France a gravimetric method, in Germany a caloric method and in the USA a volumetric method of calculating how much milk infants needed to thrive was developed and adopted in the 1890s. Each was born of and reflected local traditions of paediatric care, cultures of nutritional science and professional interests. These three apparently conflicting, but actually complementary approaches to infant feeding were not reconciled until the 1920s when a new generation of paediatricians succeeded the champions of each.

Keywords: infant; feeding; nutrition; welfare; weighing; metabolism


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