• Ezio Sartori.
• Unità operativa Medicina Pediatrica, Azienda Ospedaliera San Camillo Forlanini, Roma, Italy.
• Med Secoli. 2002 Jan 1; 14 (2): 609-22.

AbstractMother's milk is the best food for the baby. The need to use foods other than mother's milk has always represented a challenging problem to be solved. The author warns that the high mortality during the first year of life during the early years of the XXth century (20%) peaked at an amazing 80% in children artificially fed at orphanages. In the considered years, the usage of baby's bottle spread among babies that could not be fed by mothers or wet-nurses. The idea of rubber teat 1845 and of automatic devices for the production of glass bottle - 1903 - contributed to the diffusion of the baby's bottle. First baby's bottles were variously shaped. However, the finding of severe gastroenteritis caused by a long rubber tube attached to the rubber teat (the so-called death-bottle), together with the necessity of a careful cleaning and the diffusion of Soxhket's system (sterilization of many bottles in the same container) will lead to the choice of large mouthed cylindrical bottles, very similar to the plastic bottles used nowadays.

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