White Blood: A History of Human Milk

A groundbreaking history of human milk

White Blood explores how the nature and properties of human breast milk were conceived within the fluctuating frameworks of distinct historical periods. For example, in the ancient world, human milk was thought to be blood diverted from the womb to the breast, where it was whitened and vivified to nourish the newborn. In the Renaissance it became known as a vital fluid transmutable into flesh by an “internal alchemist”; in the Enlightenment it was said ...