MEDICINE IS A neatly sorted discipline. From head to toe, all major parts of the body have a specialism: cardiology(心脏病学) for the heart, urology for (male) genitals, neurology for the brain, even psychiatry for the embodied mind. All, that is, but one. Mammary glands, though possessed by one half of humanity and admired by the other, lack a dedicated field.(乳腺虽为一半人类所拥有并为另一半所欣赏，却缺少一个专门的研究领域。) Science, too, has neglected the body’s milk-making function. This lack of “lactology(哺乳学)” is bad for infants and mothers.
医学是一门井井有条的学科。从头到脚，身体的所有主要部分都有一个专科：心脏科对应心脏，泌尿科对应（男性）生殖器，神经科对应大脑，甚至精神病学对应具身化的心智。然而，只有一个例外。乳腺，尽管为一半人类所拥有并为另一半所欣赏，却缺少一个专门的研究领域。科学也忽视了身体的泌乳功能。这种“哺乳学”的缺失对婴儿和母亲都不利。
More than 130m women give birth each year. Of the nearly 2bn women and girls alive today who have not yet done so, over 90% can expect to have a child at some point. Most mothers try to breastfeed, but two in five(五分之二) of those who do will encounter at least some problems. For some it hurts, like being bitten by a critter(小动物、虫子) you can’t swat away. For others, producing enough milk to feed their baby proves impossible. And often, the advice they receive is both painful and useless. Yet despite the vast unmet demand for better advice and treatment, scandalously(可耻地) little is known about the subject.
每年有超过1.3亿女性分娩。在当今活着且尚未分娩的近20亿女性和女孩中，超过90%的人预计在某个时候会生孩子。大多数母亲尝试母乳喂养，但其中五分之二会遇到至少一些问题。对一些人来说，疼痛就像被一个无法拍走的虫子咬了一样。对另一些人来说，产生足够的乳汁喂养婴儿是不可能的。而且，她们得到的建议往往既痛苦又无用。然而，尽管对更好的建议和治疗的需求巨大，但对该领域可耻地知之甚少。
A search for “low milk supply” or “low milk production” returns a meagre(微薄的、不足的) 14,000 academic papers on PubMed, a database of 40m medical-research papers. “Erectile dysfunction”, which afflicts perhaps 300m men (mostly minimally), elicits(引出、引起) 32,000 studies. This neglect matters. Mothers are free to choose not to breastfeed. But most want to try, because the benefits for their babies, such as helping ward off infections, are large. A study in the Lancet, a medical journal, in 2016 found that if all babies were breastfed, 823,000 deaths of children under five would be averted(避免、防止) each year, partly because in poor countries formula is often made with dirty water.
在PubMed（一个有4000万医学研究论文的数据库）上搜索“低奶量”或“低产奶量”只返回了区区14000篇学术论文。而“勃起功能障碍”影响了大约3亿男性（大部分很轻微），却引出了32000项研究。这种忽视很重要。母亲们有权选择不母乳喂养。但大多数母亲想尝试，因为对婴儿的好处很大，比如帮助抵御感染。2016年发表在医学期刊《柳叶刀》上的一项研究发现，如果所有婴儿都母乳喂养，每年将避免82.3万五岁以下儿童死亡，部分原因是在贫穷国家，配方奶常常用不干净的水冲调。