To ask what people did before formula?

[Annabelleinapickle]

There's always a BF/FF debate but genuinely what did we do before formula existed? It worked fine then, people produced milk? Personally I think it's all the devices, unhealthy crap invented that has made our bodies less able.

I'm a bit shocked by people being fed these dodgy concoctions. I'm 51, I was given proper formula, Cow and Gate I think.

Wet nursing was pretty widespread at various points in history - not just for the upper classes. Occasionally it was quite fashionable: there were medical treatises int he eighteenth century deploring the fashion for wet nursing, which meant children were often sent away to wet nurses for several years, sometimes dying or begin maltreated in the process. Often working class working mothers paid other women to nurse their babies, too; for example during the early nineteenth century when many poor women were forced to work appalling hours (one of the reasons why the Victorians started trying to invent the first commercial formulas). There's some horrible evidence from a foundling hospital in nineteenth-century London IIRC, where they kept trying out early versions of formula on orphaned babies and something like up to 95 percent of them died :(

You are 51, so your 10 years older than me and cow and gate wasn't around in my time.

Washediris, i remember being fed raw eggs, was not a baby though lol.

Tinkly my parents are roughly your age and were also given proper formula!

Well, except for my dad when his mum decided the night feed wasn't happening anymore so gave him bottles of water

findingmyfeet that makes me so sad. Your poor grandmother and your uncle.

I would have been a great wet nurse! It's probably my one natural talent My previously 32D breasts went up to 34HH and I produced milk by the gallon - DD fed for two years and I never once fed her both breasts in a single feed: I had to block nurse from the word go, sometimes three times from the same breast before switching to the other, to reduce supply. It look 12 weeks for my supply to drop enough to just alternate with each feed, and I spouted milk like a fountain every time DD cried. I could have fed three babies at a time! (the fact that it was bloody agonising on the nipples was beside the point...)

My step brother is 48 he was fed carnation milk as a baby. I am 42 I was fed formula with something added to it as I was hungry and apparently,a hole cut in the bottle teat as the milk was then too thick to get out otherwise.

To the lady whose uncle with the cleft palate who died, that has made me feel both very sad and very grateful, my daughter is 10 and was born with a cleft lip and palate and severe reflux, she was fed with special bottles where the milk is squeezed into baby's mouth. After her lip repair at 3 months she refused the bottle (mouth too sore from op) and I had to feed her milk from a spoon it took ages and I then taught her to drink from a doidy cup.

Babies in my DH's family starved to death about a hundred years ago. Twins and their mother wasn't able to produce enough milk, both died.

One of my grandmothers donated milk to other mothers/babies in hospital when she had her elder DCs. Ironically I believe she then had supply problems herself with later children (possibly due to some misguided medical interventions) so I seem to remember some of them had to be given DIY mixtures of cow's milk, sugar and so on.

I was apparently given sugar water in hospital as a baby because the midwives didn't want to wake my mother to feed me, even though she'd expressly told them she wanted to BF and to wake her as necessary. She was not impressed! I like to blame my sweet tooth on that now

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/

Just be glad you aren't an Egyptian. The link is an article about feeding babies.

After seeing an early glass bottle in a museum with information stating that many babies died from infection due to no sterilisation of the bottle, I wonder whether some of the 'failure to thrive babies' actually died from infection rather than lack of breast milk. I was breastfed but think my mother had supply issues as she said she had to have a little tube that came over her shoulder and down to her nipple that I fed from at the same time. I assumed it was formula (I'm 36) but having looked at my hospital notes, I see it was actually glucose water no wonder I have such a sweet tooth, cheers mum

This is one of the most interesting threads I've ever read in here. What a lot of information about social history we have between us.

My grandparents both lived to very good ages but never stopped regretting not being able to afford to have treatment for their son's cleft palate deformity. Sunflower - my grandmother did try to feed him with a spoon but he just became weaker. I'm glad your daughter had a happier outcome.

OP - why do you think you're not producing enough milk for your baby? Are you expressing? Expressing isn't a reliable indicator of how much milk you are producing as a baby is far more efficient at getting milk out than a pump is. Is it possible for you to breastfeed?

Also, someone mentioned formula in developing countries. The disgusting tactics of formula companies in those countries are just so underhanded and evil. They go into hospitals, pretending to be healthcare workers or have given official healthcare workers bribes, give mothers free formula samples and are told untruths about formula, the mothers give their baby the formula, their breastmilk stops and producing, they leave hospital, no more free samples are given so they have to buy the stuff which they can't afford anyway and then don't have the proper facilities to prepare the formula safely (no clean water etc). And the instructions on the tin are not even in their own language some of the time so they don't understand the instructions. Formula companies are responsible for so many unnecessary infant deaths in developing countries, it's appalling.

According to their website Cow and Gate have been making baby formula since 1908
www.cowandgate.co.uk/about-us/history

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_formula

Thanks for making the point about evolution, Bertie! It's one of those great myths - that just because a species is doing well relative to its competitors for a certain ecological niche, that means every individual must be doing well.

My mum fed me for quite a long time (5 months I think) then weaned me onto Carnation milk, back in the 60s. She had super-productive breasts, when in hospital expressed and donated for the premature babies, which is why it came as such a shock to me to find I was really crap at it - due to PCOS, probably, plus DS's tongue tie (again, naively I didn't realise what a problem this could be, because I had a tongue tie and my mum fed me okay - but I now realise this is probably because she had a let down reflex like Niagara falls!)

I'm 50 and was fed on C&G, so it was definitely around in the sixties.

There was a 21 year age gap between my exh's DM and her youngest sister who was born several months after exh's DM gave birth to her first child. Their mother didn't have enough milk to feed her youngest child so exh's DM breastfed both her own child and her youngest sister.

I imagine this was pretty common in large families at that time - both babies are now heading for their 90th birthdays.

My father nearly died through breastfeeding issues in the 40s and I don't think my grandmother ever truly recovered. I often wonder how different both their lives would have been if she could have just picked up some cartons of formula in Tesco.

Babies died, or struggled along on inappropriate substitutes (e.g. bread soaked in water), unless you could afford a wet nurse.

2 interesting links to add to the thread, for anyone interested in the social history; the first from that doyenne of Victorian housewifery detailing infant feeding methods; strongly recommending breast feeding but describing in detail how to 'rear by hand' or use a substitute for breastmilk
mrsbeeton.com/42-chapter42.html
Though I would advise skimming over the tedious speculative physiology section at the start....

The second is an account from the Lower East side tenement museum in New York describing the issues of milk supply and contamination in the 19th centaury www.tenement.org/encyclopedia/diseases_marasmus.htm
As the city expanded; this combined with a growing population of women with little family support systems (many were immigrants´in an expanding urban community) with poor health and nutrition themselves and a need to work outside the home in industries without our current health and maternity protections, meant that the practice of substituting cows milk became more common and the cows milk substituted was likely to be poor quality, adulterated and potentially infective source. This was one of the great drivers to the creation and provision of packaged formula milks: to improve infant survival and nutrition in this situation

Gosh, people are so touchy on here these days No idea why you're getting a hard time, OP. I used to wonder the same thing when I had my DS and really struggled with BF. All the rhetoric from the NCT was 'it's so natural, it's how we evolved' blah blah but I was having a hell of a time with it.

So I looked into the history of infant feeding and as others have said on this thread, wet nursing was much more common and also 'dry nursing' as it was called - feeding with pap or animal milks. The reason formula was developed was because of concern about high infant mortality from poor homemade breastmilk substitutes. Also there were ideas at the time about poor 'urban' mothers producing milk that would give their baby's a weak constitution or pass on disease (so ironic given what we now know about BF), concerns about breastfeeding mothers drinking, unhealthy lifestyles etc. It is an interesting history.

My brother and sister were fed on cows milk fortified with iron from birth, in the late 60s / early 70s. Luckily by the time I was born 10 years later, my mother had been switched on to BF by a friend's advice so I was breastfed. Only for about 8 weeks though and then onto cows milk.

There did seem to be an obsession in the past too about weaning early and packing babies up with cereal as if this was a sign of good development in the child or something.

This is a great thread though. I am always fascinated by the social history of how ideas change over time.

loving the really good post on evolution Bertie
I think people forget that nature really doesn't give a shit about the individual:
as long as enough of the population survive to breed (eg over 50%) then the population will continue to expand and therefore in evolutionary terms be successful.
Explains most of human history really, the population continues to survive and thrive despite levels of 'natural wastage' (horrible phrase!) eg deaths of individuals that we today find unacceptable and do our best to mitigate