A social history of wet nursing in America: from breast to bottle

physicians such as Tarnier, Pierre Budin, and others; and how French society of thefin de siecle understood and received these incubators. He then discusses the nuances of technology transfer and transformation as the incubator made its way across the Atlantic, some ten to twenty years after its invention and acceptance in France. Baker spends considerable time illustrating how this particular process of technology transfer was influenced by other inventions that were widely heralded in the popular press and which caught the imagination of the American and French public. One of the most interesting chapters of the book, 'Propaganda for the premies', discusses the many uses of the premature infant incubator, from life-saving machine employed in a hospital, to venues of entertainment at world fairs, expositions, and amusement parks such as Coney Island. And while "premie" is probably a more recognizable term to modemday physicians than it would have been to those early twentieth-century ones he is writing about, Baker ably documents how teams of physicians and showmen developed prematurebaby shows-complete with medical attendants, nurses, and babies in incubatorsranging from Bamum-esque displays of entertainment to eamest attempts at educating the American public on the scientific contributions being made by this new technology. Other chapters explore how physicians of different specialties and viewpoints-chiefly, obstetricians and paediatricians-developed markedly different views of the premature infant and its aftercare. A final essay explores the eclipse of the incubator in the United States as paediatricians and public health workers of the first two decades of the twentieth century turned from treatment of the premature infant to prevention strategies, such as education efforts. In France, as Baker points out, the stresses of World War I further splintered a similar redirection of energies from the treatment of prematurity to its prevention. In his conclusion, Dr Baker asks if the infant incubator was a technology that "misfired". Aside from the shocking visual image this metaphor conjures, Baker concludes that this is not the story of a technology that was ignored by an unappreciated or apathetic audience. On the contrary, as The machine in the nursery demonstrates, the incubator attracted the attention of some of the best paediatricians and obstetricians of the day.