Re Pat's comment about bottle-feeding just replacing wet-nursing -- yes, I am
just finishing another dense but brilliant book, THE FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE
IN ENGLAND 1500 - 1800, by Lawrence Stone -- not a new book (1970s maybe) but
a classic -- I am reading the abridged edition which is only one volume but
also around 600 pages!    Stone is very clear that children nursed by their
own mothers have also always had a longer life expectancy than children
otherwise fed, which in this period in England meant wet-nursing (or dry
nursing, usually because the baby was abandoned and in an institution, common
in this period -- of 15,000 babies in the foundling hospital in its first
year 10,000 died :<).

All the doctors and preachers knew this, and most families knew it too.  But
wet-nursing was still the overwhelming custom for any family that could
afford it -- meaning all but paupers, basically -- until the Puritans made
nursing one's own child an element of wifely virtue in the 1600s.   In fact
in the late 1600s when even a very few aristocratic women bf their own kids,
he has letters from French nobility, writing home to their families in
astonishment that "In England, even some women of quality nurse their own
children!!"    Stone emphasizes over and over that wetnursing persisted even
though everybody knew that it was contrary to the child's health.

In European society, at least, there really seems to have been no golden age
for bf.

(it's a great book.)

Elisheva Urbas in NYC, contemplative.

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