Lieffers, Caroline (Author)
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume: 79
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-22
In 1867, controversy erupted when Jean-Anne-Henri Depaul, a Paris accoucheur, tested Justus von Liebig’s new “food for infants” on four newborns, all of whom died within days. This paper examines the origins of Liebig’s food, the debates in the French Academy of Medicine after Depaul’s experiment, and how the events were discussed in the medical and popular presses. I argue that the controversy was shaped by a number of interconnected concerns, including the product’s impracticality, disagreements within the field of chemistry, the riskiness of Depaul’s experimentation, Liebig’s problematic celebrity, the potential hubris of trying to emulate a natural product, and national tensions between France and Germany. Infant feeding was an emotionally charged and highly politicized site where multiple interests, anxieties, and ways of knowing collided. Although commercial infant foods, many of which made reference to Liebig in their advertising, would ultimately find popularity in the last decades of the nineteenth century, close attention to the first years of Liebig’s product demonstrates that its credibility as a “scientific” mode of infant feeding was far from assured. Rather, Liebig’s milk illustrates the early challenges of constructing and enforcing knowledge and trust at the intersection between food, science, and infant life, in both professional and popular arenas.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Lawrence Trevelyan Weaver;
(2021)
White Blood: A History of Human Milk
(/isis/citation/CBB440792593/)
Book
Spary, E. C.;
(2014)
Feeding France: New Sciences of Food, 1760--1815
(/isis/citation/CBB001552819/)
Article
Otter, Chris;
(2011)
Hippophagy in the UK: A Failed Dietary Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001210132/)
Article
Bryder, Linda;
(2009)
From Breast to Bottle: A History of Modern Infant Feeding
(/isis/citation/CBB000932181/)
Book
Jessica Martucci;
(2015)
Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America
(/isis/citation/CBB467915211/)
Article
Newton, Gill;
(2011)
Infant Mortality Variations, Feeding Practices and Social Status in London between 1550 and 1750
(/isis/citation/CBB001210674/)
Article
Corinna Treitel;
(2020)
Nutritional Modernity: The German Case
(/isis/citation/CBB961301071/)
Book
John Crowley;
William J. Smyth;
Mike Murphy;
(2012)
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine
(/isis/citation/CBB381920737/)
Book
Benjamin R. Cohen;
(2019)
Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food
(/isis/citation/CBB174903984/)
Article
Carlo Rubiola;
Valeria Magnelli;
(2016)
L'alimentazione nella spedizione dell'esercito sardo in Crimea (1855-1856)
(/isis/citation/CBB625654680/)
Multimedia Object
Claire Clark;
Williams, Elizabeth A.;
(2020)
Elizabeth A. Williams, “Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950” (U Chicago Press, 2020)
(/isis/citation/CBB564940117/)
Article
Giovanni Cipriani;
(2016)
Il problema alimentare negli "Avvisi agli Stranieri" di Giacomo Barzellotti (1838)
(/isis/citation/CBB681958419/)
Book
Guillem-Llobat, Ximo;
(2010)
De la cuina a la fàbrica: l'aliment industrial i el frau: el cas valencià en el context internacional (1850-1936)
(/isis/citation/CBB646179148/)
Article
Nicolau-Nos, Roser;
Pujol-Andreu, Josep;
Hernández, Ismael;
(2010)
Milk, Social Acceptance of a New Food in Europe: Catalonia, 19th--20th Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB001022202/)
Thesis
Pucciarelli, Deanna L.;
(2007)
The Medicinal Use of Chocolate: Past, Present and Future (1776--2007)
(/isis/citation/CBB001561306/)
Article
Gal Ventura;
(2019)
‘Long Live the Bottle’: The Rise of the French Bottle-feeding Industry in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB796521797/)
Book
Paul, Harry W.;
(2011)
Henri de Rothschild, 1872--1947: Medicine and Theater
(/isis/citation/CBB001250974/)
Article
Cristiana Loureiro de Mendonça Couto;
(2015)
The Chemistry of Diet: Medicine, Nutrition, and Staple Foods in Imperial Brazil
(/isis/citation/CBB922346418/)
Article
Mol, Annemarie;
(June 2013)
Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting
(/isis/citation/CBB553601905/)
Article
Anya Zilberstein;
(2016)
Bastard Breadfruit and other Cheap Provisions: Early Food Science for the Welfare of the Lower Orders
(/isis/citation/CBB311683043/)
Social History of Medicine
Atti e Memorie, Rivista di Storia della Farmacia
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Be the first to comment!