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Jacqueline H. Wolf. Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Women and Health Series: Cultural and Social Perspectives. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. xvii + 290 pp. Ill. $65.00 (cloth, 0-8142-0877-0), $24.95 (paperbound, 0-8142-5077-7).
Jacqueline H. Wolf begins her social history of breast-feeding in the United States with a stark statement of fact: "For every one hundred babies born in the United States in the late nineteenth century, close to thirteen of them died before their first birthday. Since many of the dead died of diarrhea, physicians laid much of the blame on an entirely preventable cause: the growing use of cow's milk as an infant food" (p. 1).
What to feed-or not to feed-one's baby at the opening of the last century was a serious business. Indeed, heated battles over the bottle, breast-feeding, and the development of safe and...