In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. There have been countless 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. 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. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild. Had the 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. In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed.
