In late 2004 the Internet Moving-picture show Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to chest-feed. Had the and then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was but really peachy to assistance out with his starting time grandchild.

Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeks although he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain's pituitary gland.

At that place have been endless 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 piffling 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 beingness observed. Among them was a Southward American homo, 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 than recently, Agence French republic-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-onetime man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second kid.

In her 1978 volume 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 chest-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father but put the babe to the breast and he would produce milk; I retrieve that'south pretty unlikely," he says. "It could exist that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the infant starts suckling."

Newman explains that medical disruptions involving prolactin, the hormone necessary to produce milk, have resulted in spontaneous lactation. Thorazine, a popular antipsychotic used in the mid-20th century, impacted the pituitary gland—the pea-size endocrine gland located near the base of the brain—often causing it to overproduce prolactin. If prolactin levels remained high, milk could follow. According to Newman, lactation is listed as a possible side effect of the centre medication digoxin. A pituitary tumor could also induce milk production: "Information technology would exist the aforementioned reason—increased prolactin levels—the one case drug-induced, in the other due to a tumor or some other sort of neurological trouble."

In a 1995 article for Discover titled "Father's Milk," Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and 1-fourth dimension physiologist Jared Diamond reconciles the nipple stimulation and hormone quandary, pointing out that such stimulation can release prolactin. He besides notes that starvation—which inhibits the performance of hormone-producing glands besides every bit the hormone-absorbing liver—can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in Globe War Two. "The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal diet is resumed," he writes, "so hormone levels soar unchecked."

Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only one, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does so spontaneously. Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their young, male milk product could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family. Why else would men all the same have nipples?

"Upwardly until a certain age, boys and girls, every bit fetuses, are duplicate, really, then women retain some remnants of the vas deferens, which is the culvert that sperm follows," Newman answers. "If yous have no Y chromosome, then sure hormones are released that say, 'Okay, we'll fix this kid's breast tissue to develop at puberty then that she volition be able to produce milk.' Men didn't [secrete those hormones], so nosotros don't usually take breast tissue."

"Actually a meaning number of boys around the historic period of puberty do develop breasts," he continues, "so the tissue is there, but it regresses." In short, men may not have full-fledged breasts but they certainly can lactate, under extreme circumstances.