New Yorker Article

[Guest guest]

In the August 18 & 25 issue there is a book review of " The History of the

European Family " a new tome from Yale. Great little article with some

interesting tidbits. My ears pricked up at the following:

" For anyone trying to square the habits of the old days with the sentiments of

the new, the fact that children worked is a small matter compared with the rate

at which they died. The period of highest risk was the first year of life, and

the prime culprit was wet-nursing. Unitl quite recently, most Europeans

believed that breast-feeding destroyed the shape of a woman's breasts, that it

was damaging to her health, that it prevented her from having sexual relations

(sex was thought to corrupt breast milk), and that it was a low-class thing to

do. As for low-class women, many of them didn't want to nurse, either, and

their work often precluded it. Some resorted to animal milk--which, before

Pasteur, was the biggest baby-killer of all--but most used wet nurses. Rich

families might move the wet nurse into their house, but most babies were sent to

the wet nurse's house, usually in the country, where, depending on the

conditions prevailing in her cottage, they stood a good chance of dying. In

eighteenth-century France, the general mortality rate before the age of one was

sixteen to eighteen per cent, but for children sent away to wet-nurse it was

fifty to sixty-six per cent. "

Interesting how raw milk is demonized here--although, personally, I wouldn't

want to drink raw milk if I lived in 18th c. Paris either! Although Price found

two examples of healthy Europeans (the Swiss and the Irish (I think) Islanders),

Europeans are not our best examples....not that this is news to anyone here.

The current attitude towards raw milk actually makes sense when you think about

the disgusting state of European and American cities of centuries past.