Send Them To Baby Farms
Louis XIV and his wet nurse. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Around the 17th century, affluent families began sending their newborn children to wet nurses, usually married peasant women who had children of their own, or who had recently lost a child. Children often lived with the wet nurse full time, sometimes for as long as 18 months, bonding with the nurse and hardly able to recognize its own parents when it came time to return home.
A nurse with too many charges might not be able to provide food for every infant, which resulted in neglect and malnutrition. Wet nurses were also known to give fussy babies a dose of laudanum (an opiate) to calm them down.
In his essay “Child-rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America” Joseph Illick writes that, “‘overlaid and starved at nurse’ was the stated cause of 529 child deaths in the London Bills of Mortality, 1639-1659.” French obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau even worried that a wet nurse may try to switch her charge out for another child, if for instance, the infant died while in her care.
Nevertheless, the wet nurse industry thrived during the Renaissance. Poor women would sometimes dispose of their own infants before looking for employment as a wet nurse with a wealthy family. Ultimately, however, the practice faded away in the 19th century with the advent of the baby bottle.
Next take a shocking photographic look at the history of child labor in America.
