Back to the Breast: An Historical Overview of the Perceived Connections Between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Breastfeeding

Abstract

In the late 19th century, physicians in the United States and Europe grew concerned about an increasingly visible subset of infant mortality: sudden infant death. Over the next 100 years, physicians worked variably to combat the problem, modifying and refining their conceptions of sudden infant mortality many times over the process. Physicians’ overlapping revisions of sudden infant mortality ultimately helped to produce the categorization of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and their ensuing, fluctuating efforts to resolve this problem shed light on social and medical perceptions of the roles that biology, the environment, and infant care practices played in sudden infant death. SIDS’s official medical classification was a watershed; not only did the formal medical label establish its “authenticity” as a medical phenomenon, but the label also asserted the inexplicability of (at least some) sudden infant death episodes while simultaneously conveying that affected parents were deserving victims of a tragic loss. In the modern history of sudden infant death in the United States, breastfeeding, in particular, was understood variably as a possible cause for unnecessary infant mortality in the decades surrounding 1900; inconsequential to the occurrence of SIDS in the mid 1900s; and finally as an important and healthful way to reduce the risk for SIDS beginning in the late 1900s.