Human Milk as Technology and Technologies of Human Milk: Medical Imaginings in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

[...] the doctors abandoned their dream, replacing their imaginings of human milk as a technology with the partially successful banishment of the maternal breast. Pediatricians and mothers alike embraced the new artificial formulas by midcentury as professional medicine both accepted and co-opted the women-led move away from breastfeeding that had begun a century before (Wolf 2001).2 HUMAN MILK AS TECHNOLOGY When Smith joined the Floating Hospital in 1921 (Boston Floating Hospital 1922), he joined a medical community that had been working to make nonmaternal breast milk available to patients for more than a decade.