Ignorance causes most breastfeeding problems.
I will only say that if something happened to your late mother then it was ignorance on her part, the doctors' part, and society's part. How did the doctor's know her milk was of no "nutritional value?" Did they have it tested and compared with the corn syrup-and-whey crap they call formula? Breast milk is thinner and bluish and does not resemble cow's milk. Yet is it superior in every way to milk from a cow, mixed with chemicals, which is given to human babies for food.. Cow's milk, is excellent, however, for growing the brains and bodies of baby cows. Breastmilk is also caused by the law of supply and demand. You need to nurse on demans, when baby is hungry. No supplements of water in bottles, no pacifiers, no nothing. Just the mother's breast. I can almost guarantee that your mother's failure had something to do with nurses giving her babies water bottles in the hospital (confusing the baby's sucking reflex), using pacificers, NOT nursing on demand, supplementing with formula. These are all recipies for nursing failire. I am sorry to have to be blunt but I have breastfed six children and have written professionally about breastfeeding.
Your mom should have gotten the service of a professional lactation consultant, or contacted La Leche League for a leader who would have personally come to her home and helped her learn how to breastfeed properly. Perhaps you and your family will do better in the future. There are many good books out today, one I like is "Breastfeeding: Pure and Simple" by Gwen Gotsch, and of course, the breastfeeding classic "The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding."
With all due respect to your expertise....
My brother and I were born in the early 1950's in a small town without much in the way of medical resources. We didn't have breastfeeding consultants -- we didn't even have pediatricians. We had one old fashioned doctor (the kind who made house calls in the middle of the night) who did it all. I believe a nurse taught my mother what to do before she left the hospital with my brother, and my mother had sisters and friends who tried to help her. My mother was not by any means ignorant or lazy or stupid. Even though we did have just the one doctor, she did seek out advice from other doctors -- those are the ones who called her lazy and incompetent. She did try her best to breastfeed my brother (he's older than I) and even though she wasn't successful then, she tried with me when I came along 2-1/2 years later. It didn't work either time.
No, there was no nutritional analysis, but it became rapidly obvious that my brother and I were both malnourished. If I remember right from what Mom told me -- both my brother and me had severe colic caused by an allergy to cow's milk. I believe she wound up having to use some kind of soy-based formula.
Believe me, if my mother could have, she would have breastfed both of us. But it just didn't happen. And whatever was in that soy formula must not have been bad -- brother and I both grew up healthy.
Something else I should have mentioned -- don't know if it has anything to do with this, but ---
Mom had bouts of anemia. In fact, anemia seems to run in her family. I don't know why -- Mom always ate healthy and she took nutritional supplements, so I don't think it was anything she did or didn't do. And I have the same tendency.
To be fair to her mother, it could be that she was having babies during the period when the best "scientific" thought supported formulas and strict feeding schedules for babies. The slightest problem and mothers were discouraged from breastfeeding, and of course, having been told they were harming their babies, mothers yielded to the "experts".
The same thing happened to my mother. She breast fed me for a short time, gave up at her doctor's urging, and didn't even try with my brother.
Without the support from a close friend and my pediatrician assuring me that my baby was doing well, I probably would have given up in those first frustrating, painful weeks too.