Dynamis. 1996 ; 16(): 369-97.

[Private habits and public interest. Breast-feeding in popular medical literature, Barcelona 1880-1890]

Fuentes Caballero MT.

From the latter decades of the 19th century onward, the style of life of the lower classes was threatened by increasing standardization that bourgeois culture introduced in industrial societies. One way in which the patterns of private and public behavior were influenced was by the transmission of new values through different communication channels availabale at that time. Feeding and hygiene became fundamental subjects in a pattern od cultural change that was favored by politicians and supported by influential institutions and social groups, which moreover played the role of mediator in class conflicts. Breast-feeding was one of the main subjects of popular hygiene and health literature at the end of the century, and represented an attempt not only to palliate infant mortality, but to mold women's behavior and consolidate a certain type of family within a context that required stability, thrift, and work to cope with the dangers of poverty and the rootlessness that were faced by the masses of workers arriving in the industrialized city.