ABSTRACT
With few babies being fed to the point of exhaustion of the milk supply, 'getting rid of your milk' is naturally a preoccupation for mothers who wish to stop. The reader will already have noticed several references to 'tablets from the doctor', and the free availability of stilboestrol or hexoestrol to mothers who ask for it cannot be ignored as a factor in the decline of natural feeding. It appears to be common knowledge that a mother can ask her doctor for tablets to 'swill away your milk', as Nottingham women say, and the use of the drug seems to be more the rule than the exception, even among mothers who are supposedly stopping breast feeding because they 'haven't enough milk'. This may be partly because of a very widespread dislike of supplementary feeding, or 'doing it half and half'. We never heard of a case in which the doctor refused to co-operate with the mother by prescribing the drug; and this further amenity of civilization must do much to encourage the would-be bottle feeder who would otherwise be deterred by the discomfort and inconvenience of engorged breasts. The point was well made by a forty-year-old mother, wife of a coal packer, who had five children, the first born seventeen years earlier.
