Antara kesan revolusi perindustrian di Britain 1760-1840 ialah penglibatan ramai wanita dalam tenaga kerja industri. Bagi kalangan mereka yang baru melahirkan anak, hambatan jadual produktiviti yang ketat telah memaksa mereka mengorbankan sebahagian besar peranan keibuan mereka, termasuk hal-hal berkaitan penyusuan dan pemakanan anak mereka. Keadaan ini menerbitkan keperluan kaedah-kaedah alternatif pemakanan bayi, termasuk susu botol, yang meningkat pada tahun 1850-an. Pada masa yang sama, peningkatan kes penyakit cirit-birit (diarea) di kalangan bayi di Britain turut dikesan. Seterusnya, produk susu tepung mula dipasarkan di Britain pada pertengahan tahun 1860-an. Berikutan kemajuan teknologi kondensasi susu (1871), produk-produk pemakanan bayi berasaskan susu mula dieksport ke negeri-negeri koloni di luar Britain.

Sementara itu, pada awal tahun 1870-an, terdapat usaha pengumpulan kes-kes diarea bayi yang disebabkan oleh faktor-faktor pemakanan bayi, kehidupan di bandar, kerjaya wanita di kilang-kilang, serta keadaan persekitaran mereka. Pada tahun 1872, korelasi atau hubung kait secara langsung di antara penggunaan susu pekat dengan kekerapan diarea telah dinyatakan oleh Dr Daly.

Namun kegiatan pemasaran dan eksport susu tin terus berjalan seperti biasa. Mulai pertengahan tahun 1880-an, susu tin Nestle telah dipasarkan di Singapura, dan iklan-iklannya mula disiarkan secara jelas di akhbar The Straits Times.

(Sumber: Lenore Manderson, International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1982), pp. 597-616 (20 pages): |"BOTTLE FEEDING AND IDEOLOGY IN COLONIAL MALAYA: THE PRODUCTION OF CHANGE").

Gambar hiasan: biarawati Perancis yang bertugas sebagai jururawat di Singapore General Hospital sejak 1 Ogos 1885: “Nuns from the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus at Victoria Street taking care of babies abandoned at the convent, early 1900s. Many of these French nuns took up nursing duties at the General Hospital on 1 August 1885 due to the shortage of trained professionals.” (National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board @ Pattarin Kusolpalin, BiblioAsia Jul-Sep 2016: |"Angels in White: Early Nursing in Singapore").

“The modern quest for technology has been motivated by the aim of avoiding the just treatment of workers and profit sharing. Cows and machines are easier to deal with, because they do not ask for justice. What is important about wet nursing is that before technology and milk surpluses launched the mass producton of artificial baby foods, this was the only viable alternative to a mother feeding. As with so many other autonomous skills, this means of economic survival was destroyed by mechanisation and industrialisation. As wet nursing declined, women who formerly would have hired out their services in this way, and could be self-supporting right into old age, had to resort to the poorest-paid menial tasks of prostitution and their health and well-being were damaged as a result. Over the course of the nineteenth century a means of employment unique to women disappeared, and both doctors and commerce paid a key role in this redundancy.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 169).

“As machines were developed to cope with the new abundance of raw materials, there was no advantage for the capitalist owners in continuing to distribute wool and flax for spinning, weaving and dyeing in the rural areas where they had been produced. A centre of manufacture in the form of a factory, built near to the reception sites of the new imported raw materials, was more profitable. Without the economic supplement of the capitalist's outwork, rural poverty (established by the land enclosures) increased, and the only way to survive was to go to the towns. … the very process of urbanisation impoverishes the countryside because it removes production from the rural areas to the towns. For example industries such as lace making and straw plaiting were thriving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were women's trades. A woman could combine a range of horticultural and domestic tasks with other skilled work. When the eggs had to be collected, the beer brewed or the baby fed she did not have to ask an overseer permission to stop work. For example, lace making requires a small cushion and pins and patient dexterity. Experience would increase a woman's speed and ability so that her earning potential would rise over the years, only to decline with her eyesight by which time she had trained her daughters. A lacemaker would have been proud of her skill, but when lace making machines were invented, demand for her handmade product fell and her lifetime's development of a unique skill became worthless. … there must have been many a women with a broken heart left to an old age of increasing poverty, her very identity as a craftswoman dissolved in the tidal wave of 'progress'. People had no choice but to go off to the towns to seek work, and when women came to have children the new organisation of labour did not allow for childbirth and breastfeeding.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 175-176).

“This first phase of change from household to industrialised production was not good for mothers or babies. Rural conditions had not been healthy by modern standards, but urban conditions were horrific. Density of population increases cross-infection and diseases of faecal contamination are more common when hundreds use on privy as was common in the factories and overcrowded slums of the expanding cities. Maternal mortality rose sharply as the century drew to a close and puerperal fever, associated with overcrowding and cross-infection, was a leading cause of death. Infant mortality had always been worse in the towns than the country. An average figure of 150 deaths per 1,000 live births is judged by the historian Peter Laslett to be typical of the rural parishes of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Compare this with the 235 per 1,000 for Central Bradford between 1891 and 1895. Diarrhoreal deaths rose steadily, doubling as a percentage of infant mortality causes in the last fifteen years of the century. Infant mortality started to fall after 1905, but diarrhoea still accounted for 28 per cent of infant deaths in 1911. An increase in medical knowledge and skill and a greater availability of food supplies is usually associated with a fall in the infant mortality rate, but the reverse was happening. England had become a wealthy and powerful nation, but little of the wealth reached the mass of mothers and babies; the structure of their lives had disintegrated as the nation's prosperity increased.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 177-178).

“Most working mothers realised that breastfeeding was better and did it when they could. During the Lancashire cotton famine in England (1861-65), women breastfed their babies and the infant mortality rate dopped. The changes in the organisation of production had never been challenged by the doctors, though to be fair there were a few calls for creches and breastfeeding breaks, but this never developed into effective political action on their part. Where mothers were not under the intense pressures of urban poverty, breastfeeding could flourish. In Lark Rise to Candleford, an autobiographical account of rural life in the 1880's, the author, Flora Thompson, records how all babies were breastfed…
…..
“Whereas religious duty and baby nurture could be combined, factory production made such human compromises difficult. Factories were not like churches; they were noisy, dirty, dangerous places. Mothers who might have quite naturally taken their child with them to the fields or to a small, non-mechanised workshop would loath to bring their babies into these 'satanic mills'. They were not fit for the workers, let alone their infants.”

(Sumber: Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 180-181).

“The technique of condensing milk, patented by Gail Borden in the USA in 1865, was introduced to Europe by Charles Page, a former correspondent of the New York Tribune. At the end of the American Civil War he became US consul in Switzerland and together with his brother formed the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in 1856, which later (1905) merged with a local company called Nestle. … During the 1960s a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, was considerably annoyed by the doctors who reported that this food was indigestible or who doubted that it was the counterpart of mother's milk. One of his admirers argued,

'For instance, if we were to say that this preparation does not agree with newborn babies, such a statement could not be supported on theoretical grounds, since in the food they got the very same ingredients as in mother's milk. As therefore the milk agrees with them I cannot understand why they should be unable to digest Liebig's food.'
…..
This spirit of concern for babies was not easily dampened and another German, Henri Nestle, a dealer in mustard, grains and oil lamps, claimed to have saved the life of a baby who, having allegedly rejected his mother's milk and all other food, accepted Nestle's 'farine lactee' (Nestle's Milk Food). By 1873, Nestle were selling 500,000 boxes of 'farine lactee' per year in Europe, the United States, Argentina, Mexico and the Dutch East Indies. … Delivering milk to babies began to be a large-scale task for these philanthropists and was seen as a noble, life-saving one. It also happened to be extremely profitable, for as efficiency in the dairy industry increased and transport communication iproved, cows' milk became cheaper and more readily available. In Britain, with the introduction of frozen and chilled meat imports, meat prices for the home-grown product began to fall to such an extent that many farmers turned to dairying as an alternative to fatstock raising and to supplying the liquid milk market which they found buoyant when other products had to compete with cheap imported food. Another group of people had been philanthropically delivering milk to infants for over a million years, but they were women, and as every nineteenth-century scientist knew, they were not to be trusted to do things properly.”

(Sumber: Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 191-193).

(Sumber: Lenore Manderson, International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1982), pp. 597-616 (20 pages): |"BOTTLE FEEDING AND IDEOLOGY IN COLONIAL MALAYA: THE PRODUCTION OF CHANGE").

“Nestle tinned milk was already available in Singapore, and unassuming advertisements appeared sporadically in The Straits Times.” (Lenore Manderson, International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1982), pp. 597-616 (20 pages): |"BOTTLE FEEDING AND IDEOLOGY IN COLONIAL MALAYA: THE PRODUCTION OF CHANGE").

“Late in the nineteenth century, English women arrived in Malaya as colonists' wives, feminizing the domestic space and establish a more permanent colonial presence. … English women's concern with their own maternity, infant care and the health and education of their children flowed over to the maternity and mothering of other women, and state services were developed in response.” (Lenore Manderson, 1998: Maternities and Modernities: “Shaping reproduction: maternity in early twentieth-century Malaya”, m.s.31).

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