Historical Research: Conditions of Boarded Out Babies of Wet-Nurses, Colonial Australia.

Wet-nurses themselves rarely left written accounts. In this article, I have reconstructed their experiences and work situations breastfeeding other women's infants in colonial Australia through examining available sources concerning their employment situations and the fate of their infants when they were boarded out, as they commonly were. The employment of wet-nurses by royal households or prominent families has long been the topic of historical accounts, whereas the situation of the more numerous wet-nurses further down the social spectrum has received disproportionately little examination.

Supporting Exclusive Breastfeeding Among Factory Workers and Their Unemployed Neighbors: Peer Counseling in Bangladesh.

Background: Thirty-six percent of females are employed in Bangladesh, many in the readymade garments manufacturing industry. Inadequate access to health information, care, and long working hours makes exclusive breastfeeding particularly challenging for these employed mothers.

Research Aim: To describe the influence of a breastfeeding education and support program on breastfeeding patterns of mothers working in garment and other factories in Bangladesh.

Is breastfeeding 'normal'? Using the right language for breastfeeding.

Background: Accurate terms aid clarity in thinking and prevent confusion. In the infant feeding field 'normal' can be ambiguous as biologically normal may not equate with culturally normal in a given time or place. Similarly, the use of the term 'intervention' is appropriate if a recommended practice is not perceived as 'normal' to that culture.

Selection criteria for wet-nurses: Ancient recommendations that survived across time.

This article will describe the content of the key criteria for the selection of wet nurses that persisted across time and the authors who transmitted this advice. Where relevant, it will include variations, such as additional recommendations or a different weighting being given to one or other criterion by a particular author. The focus is on the selection of a wet nurse for the employer's baby.

The Tenth Step of the BFHI: What midwives need to know about optimal support for mothers, post-discharge.

This commentary discusses the 10th Step of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), the only step that goes beyond the hospital to provide for the mother to receive breast-feeding support after she returns to the community. The reasons why such support is needed, and how this support has been provided in different settings, will be discussed. Post-discharge support for breast-feeding mothers takes many forms and is optimised when mothers can access both professional and peer support.

Milk siblingship, religious and secular: History, applications, and implications for practice.

Problem Or Background: Milk kinship has religious and practical importance to Muslim families that is not well understood in Western cultures. The relationship occurs when an infant receives the milk of a woman other than the biological mother, creating familial relationships between the child and the woman whose milk is received. As milk siblings, her children and the recipient infant must never marry each other.

Assumptions and advice: mothers and Queensland well-baby clinics. A review.

In 20th century Australia, free well-baby clinics were run by maternal and child health nurses, although the funding and organisational structure varied from state to state. It was assumed that women who attended followed the advice assiduously; yet attendance did not necessarily equate to practice. In Queensland, the state government's free Maternal and Child Welfare Service (MCW) advised mothers on infant feeding and care through well-baby clinics throughout the state, a correspondence section for mothers in remote areas and a railcar clinic to some western towns, under the state government's policy of covering every mother and baby in Queensland.

Human milk use in Australian hospitals, 1949-1985.

This paper will draw mainly on the experiences of fourteen women to explore the use of expressed human milk by hospitals in Australia from the postwar period through to 1985. The purpose is to provide a snapshot of common practices before the decline of human milk banking and other uses of expressed breastmilk in Australian hospitals, thus providing a source for future comparison against the more rigorous, uniform practices being instituted in the new milk banks of the early-21st century. The ten mothers included were a convenience sample drawn from the author's networks, with recruitment continuing till a range of hospital types and a majority of states were included.

Human milk banking to 1985.

This paper provides a literature review of the use of donor human milk by hospitals in Australia and elsewhere from the postwar period through to the early 1980s, and establishes the context for a small study of practices which happened in that period. The latter study will be reported elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to provide a resource for future comparison when the history of the new hospital milk banks of the 21st century is written.

Human milk banking in the volunteer sector: policy development and actuality in 1970s Australia.

Objective: to describe the development of rigorous milk banking policies in the voluntary sector in Australia, 1975-1979, by the non-government organisation, the Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia (now the Australian Breastfeeding Association), and the eventual abandonment of milk banking by the organisation.

Design: historical article.

Setting: Australia in the years 1975-1979.

Mothers' experiences of sharig breastfeeding or breastmilk co-feeding in Australia 1978-2008.

While the concept of breastfeeding in contemporary Western culture is of a mother breastfeeding her own baby or babies, others have replaced the mother as provider of breastmilk, for a variety of reasons, through most periods of human existence. Existing policies for the sharing of this bodily fluid, milk, appear to have been written without the benefit of a detailed examination of the actual experiences of the mothers and babies involved. This study attempts to fill this information gap by investigating the sharing of breastfeeding or expressed breastmilk by Australian women in a recent thirty-year period, 1978-2008.

Sharing breastmilk: wet nursing, cross feeding, and milk donations.

Wet nursing and cross feeding both involve the breastfeeding of a child by someone other than the mother. Wet nursing involves a woman who is not the social equal of the employer, is never reciprocal, and is normally for payment. Cross feeding (also 'cross nursing') is the informal sharing of breastfeeding between equals, and is usually unpaid and may be reciprocal.

Breasts for hire and shared breastfeeding: wet nursing and cross feeding in Australia, 1900-2000.

Wet nursing and cross-nursing both involve the breastfeeding of a baby by someone who is not the baby's mother. They differ in that wet nurses were usually employees in paid situations and the breastfeeding was not reciprocated, whereas cross-nursing was between peers and was usually unpaid and could be reciprocal. In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century wet nurses were employed in private homes or institutions.

Breast hypoplasia and breastfeeding: a case history.

Hypoplasia, or glandular insufficiency, of the breasts is an infrequent cause of breastfeeding failure or infant failure to thrive. Early evaluation of the breasts of early identification of infant indicators can enable mothers to breastfeed while providing appropriate supplementation to facilitate satisfactory hydration and growth. A case report is presented of a highly motivated mother with minimal breast tissue who was able to soothe four of her infants at her breasts, supplying some breastmilk, while providing the bulk of their nutritional requirements by other means.

Latch and the fear response: overcoming an obstacle to successful breastfeeding.

A cringe response, born of fear of anticipated nipple pain, creates behaviours that undermine comfortable latch of baby at breast, resulting in the pain th women feared. Fear is an important response in human survival but sometimes the behaviours resulting from the fear are inappropriate. This case study discusses the psychological processes and specific physical responses observed in a woman who is experiencing nipple pain during breastfeeding.

Printed advice on initiating and maintaining breastfeeding in mid-20th-century Queensland.

This article, which is part of a larger historical study of infant-feeding advice received by mothers in Queensland, Australia, identifies and examines print materials that were used by mothers, or that influenced other texts, during the postwar period from 1945 to 1965. The texts are described within the context of their environmental influences and the medical knowledge and research of the time to assess what effect, if any, these latter materials had on the established system of infant-feeding advice. Two innovations that were employed are the use of interviews to identify the most-used texts and the comparison of popular advice books with medical journal material.