| The history of the feeding bottle |
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Baby food
Proprietary or artificial infant foods became available on a commercial basis, thanks to pioneering efforts of Justus von Liebig, who marketed his "perfect" infant food in 1867. His "formula" was a mixture of wheat flour, cow's milk and malt flour cooked with bicarbonate of potash to reduce the flour's acidity. It was first sold as a liquid but later marketed as an entirely farinaceous powder. "Patent" or "instant" baby foods manufactured by Nestle's and Horlick's contained dried cow's milk with starch or malt and Mellin's Food was made with desiccated malt extract. A final group of foods of pure cereal origin was represented by brands such as Imperial Grain, Eskay's Food, and Robinson's Patent Barley. Medicine made strides that would have overwhelming effects on health and nutrition. Advances in bacteriology by Pasteur, Koch and their contemporaries made milk handling safer for infant consumption. Milk chemistry and modifications for its improved digestibility were studied . Meigs in Philadelphia and Biedert in Germany, in the 1890's, studied milk composition. Finklestein devised "protein milk," one with low fat, low carbohydrate and high protein, to "counteract with harmful effects of carbohydrate fermentation in the intestines." Czerny in Austria developed a butter-flour mixture because he felt infant diarrhea was due to fat intolerance. The term "formula" was derived from Thomas Morgan Botch's approach to "percentage feeding." Complexity in formula construction reached its zenith. Careful attention was paid to exact percentages of fat, carbohydrate and protein. The protein was often split to alter the proportion of whey and casein. A common basic formula, at the time, at Infant's Hospital in Boston was 2-6-2, meaning 2% fat, 6% carbohydrate, and 2% protein. Dr. Lee Forest Hill commenting on his training in Boston said, "One of my duties was examining each day the stools of some 20 infants for neutral fat, fatty acids and soaps. Although I have long since abandoned using carbofuchsin and Sudan 111, nevertheless, I have never overcome the habit of visual and olfactory inspection of stools of sick infants -- "stool gazing" is the present term -- much to the amusement of my house staff." Indeed, pediatric texts of the era were never without several pictures of stool types, adding vivid color when available. Other important advances were Henry Coit's artificial milk, acidified milk, and the concept of "curd tension" by Marriott of St. Louis and Chicago's Brennemann. In New York, Jacobi strongly supported breastfeeding, stating that "No matter how beneficial boiling or sterilization or pasteurization may be, they cannot transform cow's milk into woman's milk." He denounced the giving of "top milk" resulting in high fat intake for babies. L. Emmett Holt, in 1895, published the highly influential The Care and Feeding of Children, the first book for parents. In 1915, Gerstenberger and his colleagues developed an artificial milk "formula" achieved by adding homogenized vegetable and animal fats and oils to skim cow milk to approximate the fatty acid content of human milk. By 1919, Gerstenberger and Ruh had fed about 300 infants successfully on their S.M.A., Synthetic Milk Adapted. Other companies continued the quest for a closer synthetic approximation of human milk or formula modification for various medical indications. Franklin Infant Food introduced, in 1923, a powdered formulation, later to be called Similac. Enfamil, by Mead Johnson, was a late comer in 1959, but the company, established in 1905, pioneered vitamin research in the 1920's with the first cod liver oil of standardized potency in 1924 and pure solution of Vitamin D in 1929. In 1934, Pablum was introduced as the first precooked vitamin and mineral enriched cereal for infants. That began a fruitful collaboration between E. Mead Johnson and Dr. T. Drake of Toronto. Both men later began extensive and world-famous collections related to the history of infant feeding. References Neonatal feeding Martin H. Greenberg, M.D. Published by Mead Johnson Nutritional
Division, 1980
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