Sarah Gibbard Cook
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A Brief History of Baby Formula

6/6/2022

2 Comments

 
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What once-common jobs can you think of that are now obsolete or nearly so? Town crier. Lamp lighter. Phone company switchboard operator. Wet nurse, a woman who breastfed someone else’s baby.

A less desirable alternative was to feed the baby milk from goats, cows, mares, or donkeys. Compared to human milk, cow’s milk contains fewer easy-to-digest carbohydrates, and more protein in the form of hard-to-digest casein. Milk spoils quickly without refrigeration or pasteurization. Babies fed only cow’s milk were less likely to survive infancy.

In 1865, the German chemist Justus von Liebig introduced Liebig’s Soup for Infants. Formulated to make cow’s milk more like human milk, it added wheat flour, malt flour, and potassium carbonate. A powdered version to mix with cow’s milk and water resolved the problem of spoilage. Soon afterward, Nestlé in Switzerland introduced a cereal composed of cow’s milk, wheat flour, and sugar, for infants who could not be breastfed. Such products were expensive. Most caregivers preferred to mix their own at home.

Harvard professor Thomas Morgan Rotch taught pediatricians to direct infant nutrition according to a “percentage method.” Caregivers should dilute cow’s milk with water to reduce the percentage of casein, then add sugar and cream to restore their concentration. It was cumbersome to do at home but reached a close match to the percentages of protein, sugar, and fat in human milk.

By the 1950s, many hospitals gave new mothers recipes for formula made of evaporated milk, water, and sugar or corn syrup, with a liquid vitamin supplement on the side. Perhaps our present emergency has caregivers reviving such recipes. (Consult your pediatrician.) On the borderline between food and pharmaceuticals, commercial formula is closely regulated to keep babies safe. That makes the industry difficult to enter. Like so much in life, it’s all tradeoffs.

Image: The bureau of wet nurses in Paris - wet nurses waiting to be selected. Aquatint, 1822. Wellcome Collection.
2 Comments
Marti Pizzini
6/6/2022 01:57:44 pm

And then there was the Nestle "Baby Killer Scandal" in the 1970's where they gave new mothers enough formula for them to stop nursing so they became dependent on the powdered product but since many of these mothers lived in poverty they had no clean water to mix the formula with so babies got diseases from the water and they had to dilute the mix as they could not afford to buy what the babies needed. Babies died. It's odd that I don't see much mention in the new stories about the baby formula issue about the benefits of breast feeding...

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Sarah Cook link
6/6/2022 06:17:14 pm

I remember that vividly and was active in the (UU?) Nestle boycott. I'm recalling Nestle gave samples to hospitals in Africa to give new moms. By the time they went home (hospital stays after childbirth were longer then, 5 days for me), breast milk had dried up. The formula could be liquid and sanitary, but too expensive to go on using without diluting it - with the results you describe.

The Nestle boycott caused a good reform of their practices. It also helped kick off a period of backlash against formula in favor of breastfeeding, which for a while had been viewed as something only poor folk did. "Breast is best" became very widespread. Unfortunately it spilled over into shaming moms who used formula, whatever the cause. More women were entering the workforce with only a short maternity leave, if any. To some extent breastfeeding became a luxury available mostly to the more affluent - or to students like me, with a relatively flexible schedule. Now I think there's an effort not to shame either choice.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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