Children’s diets at the turn of the 20th century

Doctor Adolphe Pinard (1844–1934) saw puericulture initially as a way to reduce infant mortality and the menace of depopulation in France. It advocated – with the slogan ‘the milk of the mother belongs to the child’ – maternal breastfeeding and the social and medical surveillance of mother and child, before and after childbirth. But it was also one of the components of the French eugenics movement and as such provoked conflicts and ideological controversies.