Breast Feeding Infants Throughout history, doctors have urged women to breast-feed their infants. Yet, mistaken ideas of efficiency in medical and infant care have combined to bring about a big decline in the number of women breast-feeding their infants today, as compared to a hundred ago. (Gerald, 1970, p.5) The decline in the number of women breast-feeding has increased the infant mortality rate because of malnutrition. (Discover, 1992, p.15) When they began recording the mortality figures, in the nineteenth century, doctors realized that many more bottle-fed infants had died in the first year than breast-fed infants. Recently, doctors have found evidence that the brain of an infant th