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From folklore to fact: the rhetorical history of breastfeeding and immunity, 1950-1997

Amy Koerber1

  • 1Technical Communication & Rhetoric, English Department, Texas Tech University, Box 43091, Lubbock, TX 79382, USA. amy.koerber@ttu.edu

The Journal of Medical Humanities
|July 22, 2006
PubMed

This article examines the recent construction of human milk's immune-protective qualities as scientific fact, demonstrating that long-standing controversies about human milk's immune-protective effects have not been resolved by a particular scientific discovery. Rather, experts' consensus on how to respond to this uncertainty has been transformed, and this transformation has had as much to do with a change in the metaphor that governs interpretation of evidence about immune protection as it has with discovering new evidence about either human milk or the antibodies in it.

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