The tomorrow of malaria

proceeds with a discussion of how both popular and medical views of wet-nursing evolved within a context of urbanism, changing family demographics, and the rise of the middle-class during the first half of the nineteenth century. The second section ofA social history ofwet nursing in America explores this curious enterprise in the post-Civil War years. The author devotes considerable effort to describing the modernization of the urban wet-nursing market and its many different sectors. Golden further discusses the backgrounds of those wetnurses who worked in middleand upper-class American homes as well as how this line of work affected their subsequent lives. Considerable attention is also paid to wetnurses working at foundling hospitals and nursing homes using a rich array of hospital case records and welfare agency reports. The book's final section discusses the many different participants in the wet-nursing marketplace from 1870 to 1910 with an emphasis on the perceptions of mothers who employed wet-nurses, wet-nurses themselves, and paediatricians. As Golden correctly notes, the emergence of paediatrics as a medical specialty during this period is "inextricably linked" to the science of infant feeding. Despite this acknowledgement, however, the author does not succeed in incorporating the many connections and discordances wetnursing had with those physicians advocating breast feeding and the powerful introduction of a safe, convenient, and inexpensive but artificial means of infant feeding. A more nuanced examination of this complex relationship of doctors, mothers, the science of nutrition, and the public's faith in that science along with her discussion of the acceptance of human and artificial infant formulas would have strengthened this innovative study. Issues of race and ethnicity are mentioned but not explored in significant depth. Curiously, relatively few examples from the popular media are applied to Golden's discussion of the experience mothers had with hiring wet-nurses, the experiences of wet nurses themselves, and the paediatrician's view of these practices. To be sure, she does dredge out some early twentieth-century references to these debates in a variety of rarely cited childcare reference books, paediatric textbooks, and a smattering of popular babycare or women's magazines, but the popular media on which she draws is far richer than A social history of wet nursing suggests. Indeed, there was a wide variety of American commentators on wetnursing and the "fitness" of a woman based on her selection of infant feeding techniques ranging from Theodore Dreiser and H L Mencken to President Theodore Roosevelt. But most importantly, Janet Golden has written a solid scholarly book on a rarely studied topic in the history of American medicine and women. In a clear prose the author succeeds in uncovering many of the complicated interactions of medicine, society, class, and work that contributed to the definition of motherhood and the practice of wet-nursing from the colonial era to the early twentieth century.