Galactic Crisis

Mabel Caines Joell is a mighty mammal. Every day the breasts of this vast, friendly colored woman produce a quart of milk for her own thriving infant and more than another quart for Manhattan's Mothers' Milk Bureau.

Mrs. Joell "expresses" her bureau milk by hand (machine milking, says the bureau, is less tiring but harder on breast tissues) ; in the middle of her donation she often "feels quite depleted" and stops for lunch. The bureau pays her 15-c- an oz. for her milk, or about $44 a week--more than the attending nurses earn. Mrs. Joell's production is the envy of the bureau's other milk donors (most of whom earn about $70 a month), and she may remain fresh for 15 to 18 months.

The Mothers' Milk Bureau needs more Mrs. Joells. So do human dairies in 17 other U.S. cities. Last week, with demand far ahead of supply, the Manhattan bureau desperately canvassed hospital lists of recent mothers, urging them to sell their milk. The bureau is already drawing on its reserve stocks of frozen milk built up in more abundant times (since 1921 it has collected some 18,200 gals.).

The milk is pasteurized, sold on prescription at 35-c- an oz. (free to poor parents) for babies who are 1) premature, 2) postoperative, 3) victims of malnutrition, diarrhea or allergy to cow's milk. None can be bought by rich mothers who simply can't be bothered to nurse their normal offspring themselves.

Dr. Miner C. Hill, chairman of the Committee on Mothers' Milk, last week credited his wet nurses with a large part of the city's drop in infantile mortality, from 71.1 to 30.4 per 1,000 births during the last 24 years. Today's growing shortage he attributes to 1) prosperity, with fewer women needing the extra income; 2) widespread indifference of doctors to the priceless virtues of mother's milk (breast feeding is discouraged in many hospitals: it means more work for the staff); 3) modern fashions in motherhood --notions that breast feeding is not only a dreadful nuisance but is somehow a little vulgar.

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