Medicine: Galactagoguery

Thousands of women with careers, social position or fashionable figures refuse to nurse their babies. Fewer in number, but also a great worry to doctors, are the mothers who would suckle their babies but have little milk. For generations doctors have tried to stimulate milk production by massage, breast-pumping and use of "galactagogues" such as barley water, beer and huge quantities of cow's milk. But none of these stimulants did much good.

Last week in the Lancet, Dr. Méave Kenny of London's Hammersmith Hospital announced that simple hormone injections had solved the age-old problem.

Chief regulator of milk production is the pea-like pituitary gland embedded in the base of the brain. From this gland seeps the powerful "mother-love hormone," prolactin, which stimulates milk secretion after childbirth. Dr. Kenny procured some prolactin made from sheep and ox pituitaries, picked at random from the hospital wards 43 "deficient lactators." Over a five-day period she gave each woman injections of 15 cubic centimetres of prolactin in the arm muscles. Almost immediately after the last injection, 32 of the mothers began to produce milk in greatly increased amounts. "In 29 cases the amount became sufficient for the whole need of the baby until weaning at the sixth to seventh month. No local or systemic ill effects . . . [were] noticed after the administration of prolactin."