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xi Acknowledgments Although it seems like a long time ago, acknowledgments for this project extend all the way back to my dissertation at the University of Minnesota. In writing the dissertation, I benefited greatly from mentoring and writing guidance from my advisor Mary Lay Schuster and from committee members Laura Gurak, Arthur Walzer, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. These are the people who taught me how to think like a rhetorician, a habit I’ve never been able to break. Since joining the faculty at Texas Tech University in 2002, I have received generous financial support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the EXPORT Center for Rural Health, and the School of Nursing. Such support has paid for graduate research assistants, travel to Elk Grove, Illinois, to conduct archival research at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) headquarters, technology needs, and a faculty development leave in Fall 2009 that allowed me to finish an early version of this manuscript. I have enjoyed many conversations with Texas Tech colleagues over the years and am especially grateful for publishing advice offered by Sam Dragga and mentoring from Laura Beard. I have discussed infant feeding at great length with Linda Brice and Elizabeth Tombs from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Anita Thigpen Perry School of Nursing and enjoyed having them as co-investigators in the focus-group research that informs some of this book’s arguments. I have received excellent research assistance at various stages from Tamra Cumbie, Ryan Hoover, and Lonie McMichael. Although there are too many to name each one individually, I am also grateful to all the students who have enrolled in my graduate seminar in medical rhetoric over the years; the discussions in this class have contributed more to this book than these students will ever know. I am thankful to the many women and men who participated in interview and focus-group research over the years. Although these participants must remain anonymous, I hope I have adequately and fairly recounted the stories they have told and that the resulting knowledge will benefit others who might encounter situations similar to those that the research participants have so generously shared. I am also thankful to John Zwicky, archivist at the American xii Acknowledgments Academy of Pediatrics History Center, and the staff at the Bakwin Library at AAP headquarters. These individuals also made it possible for me to visit the AAP headquarters and conduct archival research that has added important historical detail to many of the arguments presented in this book. Since the moment I first considered submitting a proposal to University of South Carolina Press, I have received wonderful support and guidance from Jim Denton, acquisitions editor. Everyone at the press has been delightful to work with, and I have appreciated their clear guidance and responsiveness at every step of the way. I also received valuable feedback from Bernice L. Hausman and another, anonymous manuscript reviewer. I am also thankful to Dr. Lawrence Gartner, who participated in two telephone interviews and offered critical feedback on an early version of the manuscript. For scholarly inspiration and support, I am especially grateful to Judy Segal, who encouraged me at a time when I really needed it and whose work continues to remind me how great are the powers of rhetoric. I am grateful to my father, who taught me the value of a good argument and was one of the first to give me critical feedback on my writing. My mother and father paid for my college education and enabled me to follow my dreams, even when those dreams did not seem so practical. I hope I can do the same for my own children. I would have never thought of this project if not for long conversations I had with my mother, Gayle Backes, and her mother, Anne Berger, about the not-so-distant history of infant-feeding practices and recommendations in the United States. Both women breastfed their babies before it was sanctioned by medical experts and in times when it was not fashionable to do so. When my grandmother nursed her babies in the 1940s, she had to hide the practice from her pediatrician. She passed away early in 2011, and this book is dedicated to her loving memory. And, finally, I have discovered along the way that writing books is a lot like raising children: both jobs require a lot more work than you envision at the outset, but they are also more rewarding than anyone...

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