What ' s new in midwifery - sort of - 30th April 2022

A new article, but historical, hence the rather odd title for this post.An article, in PLoS One, looks at the incidence of breastfeeding in a rural Dutch community in the 19th century, using isotope analysis of the bones of young children from a dairy farming community.  It finds that the incidence of breastfeeding was low.  Other similar communities had higher incidence and it is suggested that it is social factors that led to the low incidence in the community under investigation.  It is suggested that one factor is that the mothers were responsible for looking after the dairy cattle, so were working, but also that there was a supply of cow ' s milk that older siblings could feed to the infants.  There is areview of the article in De Volkskrant, which is how I first found out about the article.  The article, in Dutch, reports that a scientist interested in the area (but not involved in the study) points out that the bones on which the isotope analysis was carried out were from infants who had died young and maybe they had died because they had not been breastfed.  Those children may have also been from a limited range of families, as they were all interred in one churchyard.  There is also the question of how generalisable the results are (although the abstract does contrast them with other areas). 
Source: Browsing - Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: midwifery Source Type: blogs