PREGNANCY

What everyone agrees on is Newman’s zeal and his knowledge about breastfeeding. He was born in Tel Aviv, came to Canada with his family in 1948, and took his medical training at the University of Toronto. His professional introduction to lactation came one day as a fourth-year medical student when he was asked to examine a new mother’s breasts, checking for lumps. Newman was stunned and mortified at the stream of milk that shot out of one breast. “I had no idea such a thing was possible,” he says. “They hadn’t prepared me for this in medical school.”

His interest began in earnest when the first of his three children was born 30 years ago. Newman’s wife, Adèle, breastfed their daughter and two sons — an experience he describes as natural but not always easy. His passion was nurtured when Newman spent 18 months working at a hospital in the Transkei region of South Africa. “I saw babies die because they were not breastfed,” he says. “The water used to mix their formula was contaminated, and these babies didn’t have the antibodies to fight off infections.”

His desire to help Canadian women solve breastfeeding problems grew during the time he spent as a staff paediatrician at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where he was surprised to meet mothers and babies struggling with breastfeeding on a daily basis. It was there that Newman started Canada’s first hospital-based breastfeeding clinic in 1984. Back then, he admits, he knew very little. Twenty-two years later, he knows a lot. Ask Sharon Woolf.

Woolf, who lives in Thornhill, Ont., has never met Newman face to face. But he’s solved her breastfeeding problems twice, by phone and email. Newman was Woolf’s last hope seven years ago when she had sore nipples that, as she puts it, “made everybody gasp at one breastfeeding clinic.” Her family doctor and a dermatologist had been unable to help. Newman nailed her problem in two minutes by phone — candida, a yeast infection. “Dr. Newman told me to go to the drugstore for some gentian violet (a purple dye used to treat thrush and vaginal yeast infections) and to paint it in the baby’s mouth and on my nipples,” says Woolf. “Within 24 hours, I was a new person.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, August 2006