Breasts by Florence Williams

Author:Florence Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Life science, women's health, health, women's studies, environmental science
ISBN: 9781921834868
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-05-22T21:00:00+00:00

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HOLY CRAP:

HERMAN, HAMLET, AND THE

ALL-IMPORTANT HUMAN GUT

O, thou with the beautiful face, may the child Reared on your milk, attain a long life, like The gods made immortal with drinks of nectar.

—SUSRUTA SAMHITA,

fourth to second centuries BC

LIMA HOSTED THE FIFTEENTH MEETING OF THE INTERnational Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation during a cool austral spring week in October. The society’s cochair, Professor Peter Hartmann, welcomed me heartily. “We’ve never had a journalist before! Maybe you can tell people about our work!”

Hartmann, an Australian now in his seventies, is perhaps the world’s foremost expert in lactation. Even so, he bears the demeanor of someone whose work is largely unacknowledged outside this crowd. He’s a little bent over, and quiet, and a bit harried. He spent the week in Lima clutching his briefcase and scurrying from meals to meetings wearing his beret and a leather jacket. His son, Ben, is also here, not quite as stooped or as sartorial. Ben, thirty-four, runs a milk bank, collecting and storing donated human milk for use in the preemie ward of King Edward Memorial Hospital on the edge of Perth. (What is it with fathers and sons dove-tailing careers around breasts? Ben’s infant, Arlo Peter, has actively benefited from the Hartmann male tradition. “As my poor wife has indeed been subjected to the full barrage of tests by the research group, we certainly had a lot more information at our fingertips than most,” said Ben.)

I sat down with the elder Hartmann during one of the numerous café breaks in a heavily tiled, open-air meeting room at our faux-Renaissance lodge. Originally, he told me, he intended to study dairy science. He got a Ph.D. in bovine lactation. But then Britain changed its export policy, and the Australian dairy market “disappeared overnight,” he said. He secured a lectureship in biochemistry at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and in 1971, his first child was born. That event piqued his interest in the human side of things. He started studying progesterone withdrawal in women after birth, and found a large pool of enthusiastic breast-feeding volunteers through the Australian version of La Leche League. Human lactation was a tough academic sell, though. “Nobody was really interested when I applied for grants. It wasn’t a good career choice.” He smiled impishly, then added, “I proved them wrong.”

Still, he said, “It’s amazing how few people are interested in this incredible organ. The breast is the only organ without a medical specialty. It represents 30 percent of a woman’s energy output, and it’s not represented by a specialty! It’s absolutely appalling!” What he meant by the energy bit is that while a woman is lactating, the metabolic energy required to feed her infant is 30 percent of her total output—or the energy equivalent of walking seven miles—every day. Looked at another way, a male baby requires almost 1,000 megajoules of energy the first year of life. That is the equivalent of one thousand light trucks moving one hundred miles per hour.

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