Say hi to Mr Teets - A3 - Oil on Canvas

MR TEETS IS VERY EXPENSIVE BECAUSE I LOVE HIM AND HE LIVES WITH ME :)

This painting was inspired by a conversation about male lactation. Interesting story for you…

“There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.

In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply by stimulating their nipples. The eminent endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt of the Medical College of Georgia concurred. But Jack Newman, a Toronto-based doctor and breast-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father just put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that's pretty unlikely," he says. "It could be that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the baby starts suckling."

Scientific American 2007