[The nursing infant at the intersection of different bodies of knowledge]

The effects of baby children's feeding on their mortality is known. It is thus interesting to know the cultural context in which bottle-feeding was adopted. In the 1930s, many women in the Eastern Pyrenees abandoned breast-feeding on the advice of their doctor because, they said, they had bad milk that "poisoned" their baby. This idea, widely spread in France at the time, took place within a set of traditional images of maternal milk and its spoiling which referred to ancient and complex beliefs concerning feminine physiology and blood disorders. These ideas were shared by women as well as by doctors until a relatively recent date.