Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Public discourse and private relations: Wet nursing in colonial America
- 2 The new motherhood and the new view of wet nurses, 1780–1865
- 3 Finding “just the right kind of woman”: The urban wet nurse marketplace, 1830–1900
- 4 “Victims of distressing circumstances”: The wet nurse labor force and the offspring of wet nurses, 1860–1910
- 5 Medical oversight and medical dilemmas: The physician and the wet nurse, 1870–1910
- 6 “Obliged to have wet nurses”: Relations in the private household, 1870–1925
- 7 “Therapeutic merchandise”: Human milk in the twentieth century
- Epilogue: From commodity to gift
- Index
- Cambridge History of Medicine
4 - “Victims of distressing circumstances”: The wet nurse labor force and the offspring of wet nurses, 1860–1910
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Public discourse and private relations: Wet nursing in colonial America
- 2 The new motherhood and the new view of wet nurses, 1780–1865
- 3 Finding “just the right kind of woman”: The urban wet nurse marketplace, 1830–1900
- 4 “Victims of distressing circumstances”: The wet nurse labor force and the offspring of wet nurses, 1860–1910
- 5 Medical oversight and medical dilemmas: The physician and the wet nurse, 1870–1910
- 6 “Obliged to have wet nurses”: Relations in the private household, 1870–1925
- 7 “Therapeutic merchandise”: Human milk in the twentieth century
- Epilogue: From commodity to gift
- Index
- Cambridge History of Medicine
Summary
No one described the moral economy of wet nursing more eloquently than the Irish-born, British writer George Moore. In his 1894 novel Esther Waters, the heroine confronts a selfish employer who has denied her permission to visit her sick child and rages:
What about them two that died? When you spoke first I thought you meant two of your own children, but the housemaid told me that they was the children of the two wet-nurses you had before me, them whose milk didn't suit your baby. It is our babies that die, it is life for a life; more than that, two lives for a life and now the life of my little boy is asked for.
Moore's heroine, Esther Waters, articulated what physicians had long admitted – that wet nursing often involved trading the life of a poor baby for that of a rich one. Or, as one physician depicted it, “by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved.” Luther Emmett Holt, the preeminent pediatrician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concurred. “Employment of wet-nurses tends, on the whole,” he wrote, “to increase infant mortality rather than reduce it, owing to the excessively high mortality rate of the wet-nurses' infants.”
The medical literature makes clear that doctors wrestled with the moral dimensions of wet nursing and, in some cases, tried to mitigate its impact.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Social History of Wet Nursing in AmericaFrom Breast to Bottle, pp. 97 - 127Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996