In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman of a sudden had the urge to breast-feed. Had the so-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream civilization face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken grapheme from his 1982 moving picture Tootsie? Nope. He was just really bang-up to aid out with his first grandchild.

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

There accept been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a brusque anecdote of a infant suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological show documented suggests information technology 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 Southward American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed equally wet nurse after his wife cruel ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children considering their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a brusk piece in 2002 on a 38-yr-sometime human being in Sri Lanka who nursed his 2 daughters through their infancy afterwards his wife died during the nativity of her 2d child.

In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply past 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 society to produce milk, a hormone fasten must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father merely put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that's pretty unlikely," he says. "It could be that you accept this human being with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the babe starts suckling."

Newman explains that medical disruptions involving prolactin, the hormone necessary to produce milk, accept resulted in spontaneous lactation. Thorazine, a popular antipsychotic used in the mid-20th century, impacted the pituitary gland—the pea-size endocrine gland located nearly the base of the encephalon—often causing it to overproduce prolactin. If prolactin levels remained high, milk could follow. According to Newman, lactation is listed as a possible side outcome of the heart medication digoxin. A pituitary tumor could also induce milk production: "It would be the same reason—increased prolactin levels—the 1 case drug-induced, in the other due to a tumor or some other sort of neurological trouble."

In a 1995 commodity for Discover titled "Male parent's Milk," Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one-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 functioning of hormone-producing glands every bit well equally the hormone-absorbing liver—can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese Pow camps in World State of war II. "The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal nutrition is resumed," he writes, "so hormone levels soar unchecked."

Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only 1, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does and so spontaneously. Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their immature, male milk production could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family unit. Why else would men still have nipples?

"Up until a certain age, boys and girls, as fetuses, are duplicate, really, so women retain some remnants of the vas deferens, which is the canal that sperm follows," Newman answers. "If yous accept no Y chromosome, then sure hormones are released that say, 'Okay, we'll set this kid'due south breast tissue to develop at puberty so that she will be able to produce milk.' Men didn't [secrete those hormones], so we don't commonly have breast tissue."

"Actually a significant number of boys around the age of puberty practice develop breasts," he continues, "so the tissue is there, but information technology regresses." In curt, men may not have full-fledged breasts but they certainly can lactate, nether extreme circumstances.