Maternal Breastfeeding or Wet Nursing? Religion, Persecution, and Ideology in the 17th Century

The well-documented benefits of breastfeeding make maternal milk the optimal nutrition for most infants.^1,2 Not so many years ago, wet nursing (i.e., women who breastfeed another's child) was a mainstream practice and became a well-organized profession with contracts and laws to regulate its practice.^3,4 Wet nurses were never devoid of stigmatization for they embodied class, ethnic, and religious conflicts,⁵ and several studies published in the late 16th and early 17th centuries encouraged natural mothers to nurse their children while fervently criticized wet nursing.⁶

One of these studies, published in Spain in 1629 by Juan Gutiérrez de Godoy (1579–1656), is Tres discursos para probar que estan obligadas a criar sus hijos a sus pechos todas las madres cuando tienen buena salud, fuerzas y buen temperamento, buena leche y suficiente para alimentarlos (Three discourses to prove that all mothers are obliged to breastfeed their children provided that they [the mothers] are healthy, strong, well-tempered, and have good and enough milk to feed them) (Fig. 1).⁷ Gutiérrez de Godoy was a respected doctor, chamber physician to Cardinal Baltasar Moscoso y Sandoval, Bishop of Jaén, and later appointed member of the physician committee to King Philip IV of Spain from 1645 until Gutiérrez de Godoy's death in 1656.⁸

FIG. 1.

Front cover of Tres discursos para probar que estan obligadas a criar sus hijos a sus pechos todas las madres by Juan Gutiérrez de Godoy in 1629. The book, printed in Jaén (Spain), was dedicated to Lady Mencía Pimentel, Countess of Oropesa, whose coat of arms is depicted.

In his book, Gutiérrez de Godoy adamantly promoted maternal breastfeeding over wet nursing based on biological and ideological or moral reasons. The biological reasons are described in the first part of the book and are essentially two. First, the similarity between the baby and the maternal milk. Maternal milk is the substance most alike to the child; therefore, it is the best and most balanced nutrition: “as pork is the most nourishing meat for adults for it is most similar to human meat^a; […] The mother's milk is produced in their own breasts, from the same blood that the creature in her womb was made of, and that fed the baby while inside her.” Note the allusion to pork, prohibited by both Judaism and Islam. Second, maternal milk is the fittest nutrition for the newborn digestive system. After being born, the baby needs to be fed by mouth. Owing to the immaturity and weakness of their digestive system, newborns are only able to be fed by liquids. Thus, nature provided that mothers infused their own blood into their breasts to produce an easily digestible white (“it was providential that nature gave it a white, instead of a bloody red color”) substance.

The ideological reasons to support maternal breastfeeding are underlined in the second part of the book. Gutiérrez de Godoy describes mothers unwilling to breastfeed their children as cruel as an ostrich (“a foolish bird that lays its eggs under the sand, leaving them to their fate”) and impious. He goes on to criticize “the depraved custom of certain mothers who, ashamed of nursing their children, hand them over to strange women” (i.e., wet nurses), and explains that some women refuse to breastfeed their children fearing to damage their reputation, particularly if the women are old, aristocratic, or wealthy.^b It was highly unusual for aristocratic women to breastfeed because the practice was considered unfashionable, the women worried it would ruin their figures, or prevented them to wear the clothing of the time.^9,10 Gutiérrez de Godoy argues that breastfeeding not only does not diminish the status of women, but increases it and accredits them, as nursing “is a virtuous, ennobling, righteous, fair, and charitable deed.” To further support this, he mentions a number of queens and noblewomen who breastfed their children, including the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God.^c In contrast, he argues, wet nurses are dishonest and bad behaved. Finally, Gutiérrez de Godoy states, “children who are breastfed by wet nurses grow without love or respect to their mothers.” By receiving milk from poorly chosen wet nurses, infants could inherit their defective spirits and bad habits: “The natural purity that a man receives from his ancestors is vitiated by the milk of servant women, who are often ugly, dirty, dimwitted and dishonest: they will contaminate the child to whom they give their milk.” The final part of the book insists: lack of maternal nursing causes bad tendencies and evil habits in their children.

Several pediatric treatises were published in Spain during the early 17th century,¹¹ and, although some of these timidly and briefly advocated for maternal breastfeeding, none exhibited Gutiérrez de Godoy's adamant and fervent arguments. Even though he does not explicitly mention them in his book, Gutiérrez de Godoy's hostile arguments against wet nurses have a prominent religious background. Gutiérrez de Godoy lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a period known as the Spanish Golden Age, during which art (e.g., El Greco, Velázquez) and literature (e.g., Cervantes wrote Don Quixote at that time) flourished. This Spanish cultural expansion was accompanied by a noteworthy Catholic fervor, and a great zeal to maintain religious uniformity, embodied by the Tribunal of the Inquisition. Gutiérrez de Godoy's insistence for purity could, therefore, be interpreted as an attempt to protect children from crypto-Jews marrano wet nurses, that is, Spanish Jews forced to covert to the Catholic faith, yet continued to practice Judaism in secret.¹² Likewise, Gutiérrez de Godoy's attack to wet nursing could be also seen as a reaction against the Islamic concept of milk kinship (Rada), whereby the act of breastfeeding creates an adoptive relationship and the wet nurse becomes related to the infant she nurses. Under this Islamic law, the children of the wet nurse and the infant receiving the donor milk are regarded as siblings, and the recipient infant would be considered the wet mother's child.¹³

Purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was a serious concern that originated in mid-15th-century Spain based on the belief that the unfaithfulness of the crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims not only had endured in the marranos and moriscos, but also may be transmitted to their descendants by blood or maternal milk, regardless of their sincerity in professing the Catholic faith. Consequently, Old Christians “of pure blood” considered New Christians impure and, therefore, morally inadequate to become members of their communities. Supporting this argument, a decree from the Bishop of Sigüenza from the early 16th century kept in the Archive of the Cathedral of Sigüenza stipulates: “no Christian child should receive milk from Jewish or Muslim women; and no Christian mother should give her milk to Jewish or Muslim children.”¹⁴ Gutiérrez de Godoy would know this well, as he was a familiar (adviser) to the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Córdoba.⁸

Disapproval of wet nursing was common in other countries. Two decades before Gutiérrez de Godoy's Tres discursos, the French surgeon Jacques Guillemeau published De la norriture et gouvernement des enfants (1609) in Paris, with the following reasons to support maternal nursing: (1) the child may be replaced by another child in his or her place, (2) the love and affection between the child and the mother will diminish, (3) a bad condition may be inherited by the child, and (4) the wet nurse may transmit her imperfections to the child.^4,9 Also in other continents and times, for example, in the 19th century United States and early 20th century Australia, the choice of a wet nurse was configured by patterns of immigration, ethnic stereotypes, and racial prejudice.^15,16

Wet nursing was mainstream until the late 19th century, when artificial feeding became a substitute. By the early 20th century, the wet nursing profession was eventually extinct. Even though maternal breastfeeding is nowadays the conventional child nutrition, according to the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund 1980 united statement, “if it is not possible for the biological mother to breastfeed, the best alternative is the use of human milk from other sources […]; human milk banks should be made available.”¹⁷ Today, regulated human milk banks (mostly in the United States) as well as unregulated Internet-based milk-sharing communities are available, none of which are devoid of ethical issues.^15,18

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