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From Folklore to Fact: The Rhetorical History of Breastfeeding and Immunity, 1950–1997

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Abstract

This article examines the recent construction of human milk's immune-protective qualities as scientific fact, demonstrating that long-standing controversies about human milk's immune-protective effects have not been resolved by a particular scientific discovery. Rather, experts’ consensus on how to respond to this uncertainty has been transformed, and this transformation has had as much to do with a change in the metaphor that governs interpretation of evidence about immune protection as it has with discovering new evidence about either human milk or the antibodies in it.

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Notes

  1. Hanson et al, “Antiviral and Antibacterial Factors in Human Milk.”

  2. Gerrard, “Breast-feeding: Second Thoughts,” 757–764.

  3. Tomasi, “Introduction,” xiii.

  4. American Academy of Pediatrics, “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” 1035.

  5. Ibid., 1035.

  6. The article's rhetorical analysis is based on a case study of 59 articles from a wide range of pediatrics and immunology journals. To select these articles, I started by locating the key texts on infant feeding and immunity that the 1997 policy statement cites to justify its claims about the immune benefits of breastfeeding. From there, I worked backwards, attempting to locate any text that was cited as making groundbreaking claims about infant feeding and immunity. Although my research has led me to encounter a few much older publications, the majority of the articles that the chapter considers have been published between 1940 and the present.

  7. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune-system Discourse,” 211.

  8. Martin, Flexible bodies: Tracking immunity in the American culture–from the days of polio to the age of AIDS, 36–37.

  9. Ibid., 37.

  10. Ibid., 119.

  11. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought.

  12. Apple, Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890–1950, 16–17.

  13. Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 74–101.

  14. Vahlquist, “The Transfer of Antibodies from Mother to Offspring,” 305.

  15. Martin, 31.

  16. Baake, Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science, 114.

  17. Sabin, “Antipoliomyelitic Substance in Milk of Human Beings and Certain Cows,” 867.

  18. Ibid., 867.

  19. Ibid., 867.

  20. Kirschner & Maguire, “Antileptospiral Effect of Milk,” 564. Leptospira is a bacteria that can be passed from cattle to humans, leading to outbreaks of a disease called leptospirosis.

  21. Gyorgi, “A Hitherto Unrecognized Biochemical Difference between Human Milk and Cow's Milk,” 98.

  22. Vahlquist, 321.

  23. Carter, “Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric,” 99.

  24. Prelli, A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse, 145.

  25. Gage, “An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives,” 166–67.

  26. Hanson, “Comparative Immunological Studies of the Immune Globulins of Human Milk and of Blood Serum,” 262.

  27. Hanson and Johansson, “Immunological Characterization of Chromatographically Separated Protein Fractions from Human Colostrum,” 65.

  28. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 110.

  29. Kenny, Boesman, and Michaels, “Bacterial and Viral Coproantibodies in Breast-fed Infants.”

  30. Ibid., 202.

  31. Ibid., 202.

  32. Ibid., 205.

  33. Ibid., 209.

  34. Winberg and Wessner, “Does Breast Milk Protect Against Septicaemia in the Newborn,” 1094.

  35. Ibid., 1094.

  36. Ibid., 1091.

  37. Ibid., 1094.

  38. Hanson & Winberg, “Breast Milk and Defence Against Infection in the Newborn,” 845.

  39. Ibid., 845.

  40. Ibid., 847.

  41. Gerrard, 757.

  42. Ibid., 763.

  43. Ogra, Weintraub, & Ogra, “Immunologic Aspects of Human Colostrum and Milk,” 247.

  44. Ibid., 248.

  45. Lemons, Lemons, & Lemons, “Breast-feeding the Premature Infant, 112–13.

  46. Ibid., 112.

  47. Ibid., 113.

  48. Ibid., 119.

  49. Baake, 62.

  50. Jerne, “Towards a Network Theory of the Immune System.”

  51. Tomasi, xiii.

  52. Hanson et al., 142.

  53. Ibid., 142.

  54. Ibid., 142.

  55. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

  56. The Battle of the Breast: Communicating U.S. Infant-Feeding Norms, 1940–2000. Book manuscript in progress.

  57. Martin, 183.

  58. Ibid., 183.

  59. Hausman, Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture, 193.

  60. See, for example, Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States; Carter, Feminism, Breasts, and Breast-feeding; Galtry, “Extending the Bright Line: Feminism, Breastfeeding, and the Workplace in the United States; Hausman; Law, “The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor.”

  61. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Healthy People 2010.

  62. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women's Health, HHS Blueprint for Action on Breastfeeding.

  63. The “Information, Referral and Breastfeeding Helpline” is sponsored by the National Women's Health Information Center. It can be reached at 1-800-994-WOMAN. For more information, see http://www.4woman.gov.

  64. On November 10, 2003, a Burger King employee at an Orem, Utah, restaurant asked a customer who was breastfeeding her baby to leave. The employee's request was reportedly a response to the remarks of another customer who claimed to feel uncomfortable with the mother's public breastfeeding. Burger King later issued an official apology. See “Burger King apologizes” for the full story.

  65. Hausman, 23.

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  1. Technical Communication & Rhetoric, English Department, Texas Tech University, Box 43091, Lubbock, TX, 79382, USA

    Amy Koerber

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  1. Amy Koerber
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Koerber, A. From Folklore to Fact: The Rhetorical History of Breastfeeding and Immunity, 1950–1997. J Med Humanit 27, 151–166 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-006-9015-8

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