SPOILED MILK

In August 1890, peasant woman Amalia Bagnacavalli traveled from her mountain village to Bologna in northern Italy to meet with Augusto Barbieri, a 28-year old lawyer. Their meeting spawned an unlikely 10-year odyssey in which the illiterate Amalia and her politically-minded attorney took on the medical establishment in Bologna and effectively changed the laws governing the treatment of wet nurses, while reaping a huge settlement.

Author David Kertzer's achievement with "Amalia's Tale" is to render an obscure and fascinating case as a riveting courtroom drama that touches on medical, legal and charitable ethics on the cusp of the 20th century. "Today too we witness the drama of a terrible disease passed between baby and the breast, but now it is infants, not the women who are nursing them, whose lives are at risk, threatened with infection by HIV-positive mothers," Kertzer points out.

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