Breastfeeding Quote: Oliver Wendell Holmes
August 23, 2009 by Angela White, J.D., breastfeeding counselor
Filed under quotes and literature
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was a physician who became a well-regarded American poet in the 19th century. I can tell he was a smart man just by this quote from one of his books:
We are willing to give Liebig’s artificial milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the child anxiously whose wet-nurse is a chemist’s pipkin. A pair of substantial mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned Professor’s brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for infants.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894), p. 276 of Medical Essays
A “pipkin” is a small earthenware boiler, so Holmes was expressing concern about the feeding of babies from a chemist’s cooking pot.
