ABSTRACT

Anecdotal evidence indicates that high-status women in England generally did not breastfeed their children in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Metropolitan families of varied social status also often sent their children out of London for wet-nursing. However, anecdotal sources and rural burial registers also suggest that these practices declined rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century, and were replaced by a culture of maternal breastfeeding in all social classes. These changes in infant-feeding practices have been argued to explain much of the dramatic improvement in infant mortality rates in London in this period. Here we used quantitative evidence from a partial family reconstitution of the London parish of St. Martin in the Fields to test these claims. Using birth interval analysis to infer breastfeeding patterns in families by four categories of wealth, we found that birth intervals were close to the national average in pauper and poor families, but much shorter in wealthier families, in the period 1752–74. We also found evidence that many infants especially in wealthier families were missing from observation, consistent with high levels of rural wet-nursing. Both these phenomena declined between 1775 and 1812, suggesting a convergence in breastfeeding practices to the national norm. We used event history analysis, with corrections to aggregate rates for missing infants, to compare mortality rates over time and by wealth category. We found that infant mortality was initially higher in wealthier families, but declined in all groups over the period 1752–1812. We conclude that increases in maternal breastfeeding were probably important in improving survival of infants from wealthier families, however changes in breastfeeding patterns were insufficient to account for the ubiquitous improvements in mortality of urban-born infants in this period.

摘要

轶事证据表明，在 17 世纪和 18 世纪早期，英格兰的地位高的女性通常不会母乳喂养她们的孩子。不同社会地位的大城市家庭也经常将他们的孩子送出伦敦进行哺乳。然而，轶事来源和农村墓葬登记也表明，这些做法从 18 世纪中叶开始迅速下降，取而代之的是所有社会阶层的母亲母乳喂养文化。人们认为，婴儿喂养方式的这些变化可以解释这一时期伦敦婴儿死亡率的显着改善。在这里，我们使用了来自 Fields 的伦敦 St. Martin 教区部分家庭重建的定量证据来检验这些说法。使用生育间隔分析通过四类财富推断家庭的母乳喂养模式，我们发现在 1752-74 年期间，贫民和贫困家庭的生育间隔接近全国平均水平，但在富裕家庭中要短得多。我们还发现有证据表明，许多婴儿，尤其是富裕家庭的婴儿，没有被观察到，这与高水平的农村湿奶护理相一致。这两种现象在 1775 年至 1812 年间均有所下降，表明母乳喂养实践已趋于国家规范。我们使用事件历史分析，对失踪婴儿的总比率进行修正，以比较不同时间和财富类别的死亡率。我们发现较富裕家庭的婴儿死亡率最初较高，但在 1752 年至 1812 年期间所有群体的死亡率均有所下降。