Medicine: The Cornelians

Every fourth Sunday for the past four years, a group of physicians and psychiatrists has sat down to breakfast in the Detroit Athletic Club. Their aim and table topic: to revive the unfashionable belief that babies should be breast-fed and coddled by their mothers. By last week their revolutionary crusade had become a national movement to urge that Mother Nature knows best.

The movement’s name: the Cornelian Corner, from 1) Cornelia, Roman mother of the Gracchi, who called her sons her “jewels,” and 2) the time-honored maternal practice of turning toward a corner, away from the family, when nursing a baby. Its president: Detroit Psychiatrist Max Wolfe.

Cornelians hold that the almost universal hospital practice of separating a baby from its mother at birth is a crime against nature, leading to emotional maladjustment of the child. A baby’s emotional needs, they say, are greatest at birth; to be healthy and happy it must be cuddled and suckled whenever it feels the urge. The Cornelian goal: a bassinet beside every maternity bed.

Theory & Practice. Most doctors agree in theory that an infant should be nursed, but in practice, say the Cornelians, “breast feeding has been rapidly disappearing from our modern culture.” They were shocked to learn that in one Detroit hospital only 5.6% of the babies were breastfed. Cornelians blame the trend on what they regard as such erroneous modern notions as: 1) breast feeding ruins a woman’s figure; 2) coddling spoils a baby; 3) an infant should be trained early to accept a rigid schedule.

Why is it, ask Cornelians (and no one answers), that babies cry only a third as much at home as in the hospital, and that, in their experience, most patients who show up for treatment by psychiatrists turn out to have been bottle-fed babies?

The Cornelian Corner so far has converted few hospitals. But two Detroit hospitals and others which have adopted the Cornelian plan, allowing infants to nurse as often as 22 times a day, have found that the babies do seem to like it.