I could not help thinking of the biblical assumption when leafing through "Kangaroo babies". We must pay tribute to Dr Nathalie Charpak for making English-speaking parents familiar with what is now known as the "Kangaroo Mother method". This is the first book raising and answering all the practical questions related to the Columbian "invention". It is paradoxical that it took so long to discover that the newborn human mammal needs first the contact with his/her mother and to "invent" such a method. The principle is so simple, and so easily understood by anyone possessing commonsense. In the case of a low birth weight or premature baby who can breathe spontaneously, the mother is considered the best possible incubator. As soon as possible - ideally immediately after birth - the tiny baby is positioned in a pouch with continuous skin-to-skin contact with its mother. While the incubator (i.e. a transparent box with a thermostat) can only satisfy the baby's needs in terms of temperature, the continuous contact with the mother's body can offer much more than that.
We needed the well-documented book by Nathalie Charpak - an active member of the Kangaroo Foundation - to realize that the concept of marsupial babies is spreading at a high speed all over the world. Many readers will be surprised to read reports about kangaroo care on all the continents (ironically, except the Australian continent!). I learnt from this book that the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh-City - arguably the largest maternity hospital in the world with 30,000 births every year - has adopted the Colombian method as a solution to limit the occupation of the incubators.
Those who had the experience of "kangaroo care" before the term was coined will regret that this term had not been used earlier. After meeting Dr Edgar Rey and Dr Martinez in Bogota in 1981, I became more audacious in the case of a premature birth in the maternity unit of the Pithiviers hospital, France. However it was difficult to justify our attitude, which remained semi-clandestine. The only legal problem I had after being in charge of about 15,000 births was related to kangaroo care. When I asked Edgar Rey to participate in a collective French book about premature births, he gave a perfect description of what he called "ambulatory treatment of the premature", without any reference to the marsupials (Edgar Rey Sanabria. Accueillir le prématuré. In: Les cahiers du nouveau-né 1983; 6: 197-203). As soon as the term `kangaroo care' was coined, we could be more audacious, and refer to a method people had heard of. A new phase in the history of this different way of mothering could start. Who coined this term? And when? Who knows?. Anyway, "In the beginning was the Word".