Wet nurse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A wet nurse is a woman who breast-feeds a baby that is not her own. These children may be known as milk-siblings and in some cultures share a special relationship. When mothers nurse each other's babies, the act of wetnursing may also be called cross-nursing or co-nursing.

Contents 1 Reasons for use 2 Eliciting milk 3 Historical use 4 Current use 5 Examples in fiction 6 See also 7 References

[edit] Reasons for use

A wet nurse may be employed if the mother of a baby is unable or unwilling to breast-feed her infant. The reasons may range from illnesses such as cancer and their treatment, to temporary difficulties nursing, to drug use (prescription or illegal). Wet nurses have also been required for a perceived insufficient production of breast milk, i.e., when the mother feels incapable of adequately nursing her child, especially following multiple births. One traditional reason for the appearance of wet nurses in all cultures was death of women in childbirth from complications, a reason that has all but disappeared in countries with access to modern medicine. Mrs Beeton gives an explanation in her book on household management published in 1861^[1].

[edit] Eliciting milk

A woman can only serve as a wet nurse when she is lactating. It is often thought that this means the wet nurse must have recently given birth to a child of her own. This may be the case, but not necessarily, since regular suckling on a woman's breast can elicit the production of milk via a neural reflex through production of prolactin.^[2] In fact, some adoptive mothers have been able to establish lactation using a breastpump so that they could feed an adopted infant.^[3]

[edit] Historical use

The practice of using wet nurses is ancient and found in many cultures. Sometimes it is linked to social class. Members of property-owning classes had their children wet-nursed, in the hope of becoming pregnant again quickly to ensure an heir. (Lactation can suppress ovulation.) Poor women, especially those who suffered the stigma of giving birth to an illegitimate child, sometimes had to give their baby up, temporarily or permanently, and a wet nurse would look after it.

One myth holds that the Egyptian princess Batya tried giving baby Moses to wet nurses, but he would not take their milk, for he was destined to speak with the Shekhinah. The prophet Muhammad was wet-nursed by Halimah bint Abi Dhuayb. Wet nursing was reported in France in the time of Louis XIV, the early 17th century. Later, Napoleon was wet-nursed by a woman called Camilla. Wet nurses were common for children of all social ranks in the southern United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Women took in babies for money in Victorian Britain, and nursed them themselves or fed them with whatever was cheapest. This was known as baby-farming; poor care sometimes resulted in high infant death rates.

Wet nursing has sometimes been used with old or sick people who have trouble taking other nutrition. John Jacob Astor and John D. Rockefeller reportedly hired wet nurses for their own use in their old age. ^[4]

Stephen Pinker speculated that Sigmund Freud's theories about the Oedipal complex to have been the result of his being raised by a wet-nurse, rather than his mother because this dissociation from his mother would have prevented the Westermarck effect from taking hold. ^[5]

[edit] Current use

Following the widespread availability of artificial baby milk, or infant formula, wet nursing went into decline after World War II and fell out of style in the affluence of the mid-1950s. Wet nurses are considered no longer necessary in developed nations and, therefore, are no longer common.

The act of nursing a baby other than one's own often provokes cultural squeamishness in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom where the marketing of artificial baby milk has been especially successful. Although the UK government is now actively promoting breast feeding^[6], and current advertising rules prevent artificial baby milk being shown as better than breast milk^[7]. Many countries adhere to the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing Breast-milk Substitutes, which was created to protect mothers and babies, and breastfeeding, from commercial influence. In countries like the U.S. that violate the International Code (allowing the idealization of formula, product sample distribution through hospital gift bags, formula advertising etc.,) there is greater cultural disapproval of breastfeeding, and wet nursing has even been viewed as child abuse.^[8] When a mother is unable to nurse her own infant, an acceptable mediated substitute is screened, pasteurized, expressed milk (or especially colostrum) donated to milk banks, analogous to blood banks. The World Health Organization recommends that babies be fed, in order of preference: 1) at the breast, 2) via expressed breastmilk, 3) with pasteurized, screened, donor breastmilk from an accredited human milk bank, and as a last resort, with 4) artificial baby milk, or infant formula.

Wet nurses are still common in many developing countries, although the practice poses a risk of infections such as HIV^[9]. Following the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, in which contaminated infant formula poisoned thousands of babies, the salaries of wetnurses in the world's most populous country increased dramatically ^[10] The use of a wetnurse is seen as a status symbol in some parts of modern China ^[9].

Islamic law or sharia specifies the permanent family-like relationships (known as rada) incurred by people who were nursed by the same woman, i.e., who grew up together as youngsters. They and various specific relatives cannot marry, that is, they are mahram, and the rules of modesty known as hijab are relaxed, as they would be for family members.

The subject is becoming slightly more open for discussion. During a UNICEF goodwill trip to Sierra Leone in 2009, Mexican actress Salma Hayek decided to breast-feed a local infant in front of the accompanying film crew. The sick one-week-old baby had been born the same day but a year later than her daughter, who had not yet been weaned. Hayek later discussed on camera an anecdote of her Mexican great-grandmother spontaneously breast-feeding a hungry baby in a village.^[11][12]

[edit] Examples in fiction

• In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet the character Nurse had been Juliet's wet nurse. "Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat." 1.3.72
• In Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the character Natasha Rostov, after changing wet nurses three times, elected to nurse her children herself despite opposition from her husband, mother, and doctors.^[13]
• In George Moore's novel Esther Waters, the eponymous heroine works as a wet nurse after the birth of her son while leaving him in the hands of a baby farmer.
• In John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, set in a time of great poverty, a woman whose baby has just died, and consequently whose breasts are engorged with milk, wet-nurses a man at the point of death, as no other nourishment is available, a reference to Roman Charity.
• In the movie Spartacus, Crassus captures Spartacus's wife and baby. Since he wants Varinia as a concubine, he purchases a wet nurse for her baby. Varinia rejects his offer, saying, "I sent her away: I prefer to nurse the child myself."
• In Blackadder II, Nursie, the Queen's childhood nurse, is commonly perceived as being a wet nurse: “In the old days, it was all difficult choices. Should you have Nursie milk or moo-cow milk? Of course, it was always Nursie milk….”

[edit] See also

• Roman Charity, works of art based on the story of a daughter feeding her dying father.
• Milkmaid
• Mrs. Pack, a wet nurse to the child William, Duke of Gloucester (1689 – 1700).

[edit] References