1750-1820

At the beginning of the 18th century, the typical baby was helped into the world by a self-taught midwife, licked with the "basting tongue" or scoured with salt to remove the "slippery glue" from its skin, and swaddled tightly on to a board. While the cocooned baby hung from a nail, its minder could get on with other tasks.

The baby would not be put to the breast until the mother's milk was seen to come in, perhaps on the second or third day. Meanwhile, purges were applied "to cleanse the child of its long-hoarded Excrement". Oil of almonds, syrup of roses and chicory with rhubarb were accepted recipes. Meanwhile, the mother's breast might be drawn by the nurse, or by an older baby, to prevent the discomfort of full breasts before baby and breast struck up their balance of demand and supply.

Frequent pregnancies left many mothers feeble, and complications following child-birth affected their ability to nurse. The best alternative for those who could afford her was a wetnurse, as animal milks were distrusted.

Tight corsets cannot have encouraged healthy breasts, and a Parisian surgeon declared to Benjamin Franklin a little later in the century that "the women of Paris could not give suck: 'Because,' he said, 'they have no tits ['tetons']'."

Sheer self-interest was quoted by many early authorities as the reason for sending babies out to nurse. But even in 1792, when maternal nursing had come back into fashion, Mary Wollstonecraft could write: "There are many husbands so devoid of sense and parental affection that, during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness, they refuse to let their wives suckle their children."

That fashion or incapacity, rather than lack of affection for the child, led to wet-nursing is suggested by the care advised in selecting a nurse. Scévole de Sainte-Marthe's advice from 1585 summons up a vision of delight - and feeding on demand: "Chuse one of middle age, nor old nor young, Nor plump nor slim her make, but firm and strong, Upon her cheek let health refulgent glow In vivid colours, that good humour show; Long be her arms, and broad her ample chest; Her neck be finely turned and full her breast: Let the twin hills be white as mountain snow, Their swelling veins with circling juices flow; Each in a well-projecting nipple end, And milk in copious streams from these descend: This the delighted babe will instant chose. And he knows best what quantity to use."

Towards the end of the era, maternal suckling no longer turned husbands off; N Brouzet confided that he had not avoided lying with his wife at these times, yet their children had been well fed. Women might even enjoy it, wrote William Buchan: "The thrilling sensations that accompany the act of giving suck can be conceived only by those who have felt them."

Children in foundling hospitals fared slightly differently. Carefully selected cow's milk was a better food for infants if breastfeeding was not possible. The safest method was direct feeding from the udder of a goat or ass. Alphonse Leroy described his success at the foundling hospital at Aix in 1775: "Each goat which comes to feed enters bleating and goes to hunt the infant which has been given to it, pushes back the covering with its horns and straddles the crib to give suck to the infant. Since that time they have raised very large numbers in that hospital."

1820-1870

Breastfeeding was a baby's birthright, according to William Cobbett. It was better to bring up by hand than to resort to the "hireling breast". Even if the experience was painful, it was worth enduring, impressing as it did both father and other children with what a mother did for them. "Of all the sights that this world affords, the most delightful is a mother with her clean and fat baby lugging at her breast, leaving off now and then and smiling, and she half-smothering it with kisses."

Unfortunately, the very enthusiasm for breastfeeding contributed to its undoing. In well-meaning attempts to inform and advise mothers, some manuals laid down methods doomed to failure. "From the first moment the infant is applied [note that distancing word] to the breast, it must be nursed upon a certain plan," insisted Dr Bull. "The baby must take a little thin gruel, or a mixture of one-third water and two-thirds cow's milk, sweetened with loaf sugar until the breast milk is fully established." After a mere week of demand feeding, "it is essentially necessary to nurse the infant at regular intervals of three or four hours, day and night". In fact the timing of breastfed babies' feeds ought not to be a problem. Hungry babies feed, bigger ones probably more often than small ones. The problem only arises when writers of babycare manuals, having told the mother how often to bath the baby and when to take it for walks, decide to tell her how often to feed it.

Better advice existed. Henry Chavasse advised mothers to breastfeed as soon as possible after the baby was born. John Darwall, author of Plain Instructions for the Management of Infants (1830), said that artificially fed babies needed feeding less frequently because they took longer to digest the food that they were given. This perceptive distinction was not made by anyone else.

By the 1850s, the improvement in patent baby-foods was felt to be so great that the manuals recommended them with enthusiasm. Chavasse's ninth edition listed 17 substitutes for mother's milk, some of them still household names today: Liebig's Food, Revalenta Arabica, Horlicks, Mellin's, Robinson's Patent Groats. The scientific halo that doctors raised over these concoctions, combined with exaggeration of the difficulties of breastfeeding, contributed to a swing after the middle of the century from the uncertainties of suckling to the security of the bottle.

1870-1920

If any one book were to be chosen to convey the mood of these years, it would be Marion Harland's Common Sense in the Nursery. It conveys the liberated mother of the 1880s briskly and wittily. She had no time for mothers who wanted to spend all their time with their babies. "The best mothers are not those in whom the maternal instinct is cultivated to an abnormal excrescence."

The most striking aspect of the downgrading of maternal instinct was the pronounced swing against breastfeeding, now represented as out of date.

The most outspoken of the anti-breastfeeding school was a redoubtable lady called Mrs Panton. Her model young couple, Edwin and Angelina, were led From Kitchen to Garret when they set up home, and told The Way They Should Go once their children arrived. Breastfeeding, still being lukewarmly recommended by doctors as "natural", may have been so in a state of nature, she conceded "but we don't live in that time now, and we must adapt [a consciously evolutionary term] our doings to the age in which we were born ... Let no mother condemn herself to be a common or ordinary 'cow' unless she has a real desire to nurse ... "

Meanwhile, Dr Eric Pritchard advised women to make themselves as much like cows as possible, if they wanted to breastfeed successfully. They were to drop all social commitments, rest a lot and follow a bland and nourishing diet.

Dr Allbutt, despite being the author of the racy but banned The Wife's Handbook, told women in Every Mother's Handbook that "sexual emotion of frequent occurrence deteriorates the quality of the milk".

By 1914, Mary Gardner likened mothers to the Egyptian hens who had forgotten how to sit on their own eggs because they were kept warm for them by their keepers. "In the same way, as a race we are becoming decadent with regard to breast-feeding, and the mothers who can't and the mothers who won't are causing successive generations to be less and less fit physically to nourish their infants naturally."

Despite Darwin's conclusion that evolution was a process that had taken thousands and millions of years to happen, it is clear that in the popular mind, the action of every generation risked influencing the whole race.

1920-1946

Truby King sits astride the early 20th century. He advocated regimental discipline in feeding and sleeping routines and in coping with crying and other nursery problems.

Struck by the high death rate among bucket-fed calves, King invented a "scientific system" of feeding, which ended all deaths from this cause. He argued that a human life a day could be saved if human mothers fed their babies in a similarly scientific and rational way.

In 1907, the Truby King movement started in earnest in New Zealand and within five years, the infant death rate there had dropped by 1,000 a year. For the next 30 years his was the dominant voice and he coined the phrase "Breastfed is Bestfed". Undeniably, the movement successfully revived breastfeeding at a time when the scientific finesse of artificial feeding was seen as altogether more satisfactory - no mean achievement.

However, King became obsessed by hard and fast rules on quantities and times of eating. He failed to allow for difficult feeding cases, and later critics felt that his emphasis on the evils of overfeeding led to a generation or two of hungry, thwarted babies, convinced of their essential unimportance during the long, hungry night-time sessions of "crying it out".

A note of rebellion made itself heard in the 1930s. The attribution of all babyhood ills to overfeeding was questioned once Arnold Gesell showed how varied infant intake could be.

The ebullient Marie Stopes queried the opinion of Eric Pritchard that a gain of more than seven ounces a week was excessive. "If you are lucky enough to be the mother of a prince among men ... you are to check this growth, interfere with the rhythmic response between your flow of breast milk and his happy and lusty development, and instead you are to rear a child, wantonly and wickedly cut down to pattern so that he, who might have been a big-boned, strong, glowing, six-foot Apollo with perfect teeth, is to be starved into matching the ill-begotten and ill-nourished 'average' with whom 'trained' nurses and 'doctors' in their disease-infested lives are accustomed to meet."

1946-1981

When feeding babies came under the scrutiny of the Freudians, there were three new concerns: dealing with biting the nipple, the timing of weaning, and how to avoid the traumas involved in thus separating the baby from its mother. Discouraging baby from biting the nipple now had to be handled very carefully.

Dr Spock also warned mothers to handle "chewing on the nipple" with care. Once the idea of nipple-biting was raised, it became a real fear in the minds of many new mothers havering between breast and bottle.

When the Freudians added that weaning should be postponed to the middle of the second year, as the satisfaction of oral impulses was vital to the development of a healthy little psyche, enthusiasm flagged even more. The new fashion for demand-feeding and schedule-free eating, at a time when embarrassment was still caused by the sight of a breast bared for action, also discouraged breastfeeding.

Although breastfeeding continued to be classed as preferable, bottle-feeding became increasingly acceptable. Writers bent over backwards to reassure mothers who couldn't nurse but in effect demoralised those who could. "When in doubt, leave it out," was Flanders Dunbar's catchy aphorism.

In the 1970s, fashion changed. New research emphasised the nutritional as well as the emotional value of breastfeeding. The few organisations that had remained true to the idea of breastfeeding - the La Leche League in the US and the National Childbirth Trust in Britain - suddenly found themselves besieged by mothers eager to feed naturally.

1981-2007

Advice on feeding has become varied and idiosyncratic over the past 20 years. Breastfeeding is given pride of place in most books. A new angle was to declare it environmentally friendly: "A bottle-fed baby relies on cows for milk," explained Penny Stanway in Green Babies. "Cows need pasture. As the population of the world increases and more women bottle-feed, more cows are needed to produce milk to make infant formula, so wooded lands are cleared to provide grazing."

Never has there been more detailed advice on how to latch baby on target, some of it gruesomely explicit. Graphic cross-sectioned diagrams of the inside workings of breasts accompany hugely enlarged photographs of babies' mouths homing in on mountainous, pimply nipples.

The new breed of anything-goes, toss-guilt-out-of-the-window experts were quick to say that breast being best did not make formula bad. Mothers were urged to "consult their own feelings" as to the methods they used. "Don't be depressed by the 'breastfeeding' brigade!" wrote Mary Beard.

In his early editions, Christopher Green enthused wittily about breastfeeding ("It would seem sensible to use the product recommended by the manufacturer"), but listed some rather far-fetched disadvantages: the cost ("Each mother will have to consume between 750 and 1,000 extra calories a day to keep up the flow") and the uncertainty that the baby is getting enough ("Your baby may have latched on like a bomber refuelling over Libya, but you don't know how much is passing through the tube"). By 2001, a paragraph on the offence that breastfeeding in public might cause has disappeared, while other signs of changing times are that refuelling takes place "over the Gulf", and a jokey aside about not exercising "with the fanatical zeal of the Ayatollah Khomeini" has been dropped.

There is no doubt that 21st-century manuals try hard to promote breastfeeding, and they certainly spell out in detail what you can expect.

But there is such a thing as overkill. They mean well, but it may be a mistake to include lengthy lists of what can go wrong or to rhapsodise over the super-suction power of an electric breast-pump. A depressingly large number of mothers get into difficulties within days of returning home from hospital, throw the book across the room and send Daddy out for some formula. As Gina Ford generously admits in her revised Contented Little Baby: "No book is as useful as informed advice from an experienced friend, relative, health visitor or breast counsellor. Until the UK acknowledges that its present post-partum care policy is severely flawed, it will continue to have a disappointingly small number of mothers who breastfeed their babies for more than a fortnight."

· This is an edited extract from Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford by Christina Hardyment, published on November 29 at £12.99.