Wet nurses

Skewered by eyes as sharp as the servant s darning needle, I bowed low. She was a tall, but not heavy woman, clad in fine velvet and lace, all in black, and carefully adorned with pearls and face paint. Palace life and ample servants and wet nurses had preserved her well only the hollow cheeks caused by lost teeth acknowledged that she must be over fifty and had borne many children. 

Distraction. She is a flighty little thing, and in this I see her mother s influence, I presume, or the wet nurse. Certainly I can t see any tendencies to distraction in Mrs. Gill... 

Europeans from the Netherlands first settled at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 to establish rest and repair station for ships sailing between northern Europe and the Far East. More than 60,000 slaves were brought to Cape Town, until a ban on the slave trade in 1808. Slaves were brought into the colony shortly after the initial settlement because more workers were needed for food production. The slaves were equally from Africa and Asia. Africans were brought from Madagascar and East Africa, and Asians from India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago. African slaves usually worked as laborers Indians, Indonesians and free blacks were craftsmen, artisans, builders, coachmen, and hawkers. Women worked as laundresses, wet nurses, and household servants. 

Human-milk substitutes existed before the modern age of formulas. Because some infants could not be fed by their mothers, humans adopted two methods for substitute feedings. The most obvious was the utilization of a surrogate mother (e.g., wet nurse), who would feed the child human milk. The alternative was to feed the child milk obtained from another mammal. The most frequently used sources were the cow, sheep, and goat (Fomon, 1993). Until the end of the nineteenth century, the use of a wet nurse was by far the safest way to feed infants who could not be breastfed by their mothers. As general sanitation measures improved during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and as differences in composition between human milk and that of other mammals were defined, feeding animal milk became more successful. However few infants survived until infant formulas based on cow milk with added water and carbohydrate were introduced. Box 3-1 lists the main landmarks in the... 

As we shall see, specialized orphanages for abandoned infants, the brephotropheia, did indeed exist in the Byzantine Empire. Moreover, there is ample evidence to show that some episcopal and monastic schools were capable of accepting infants, finding them wet nurses. 

Basil recommended that the monastery accept children as soon as they reached the first age, sometime between five and seven/ His school apparently did not accept infants and very small children. It is conceivable, however, that Basil simply outlined in this section the functioning of the school and left out any description of how his monastery nurtured infants and small children. Pre-Christian educational theorists had also avoided discussing these early years as irrelevant to a child s subsequent intellectual development. Moreover, the care of very small children would have involved obtaining and supervising wet nurses, an activity Basil might have left to another department of his monastic charities, distinct from the school. 

Since Apokaukos accepted John as a newborn infant, he must have had some arrangement to provide the baby with a wet nurse. Apokaukos baptized the infant and gave him his own first name, John. According to the bishop s letters, he especially loved John, personally taught the boy grammar, and, because of his affection for the boy, hesitated to send him away from Naupaktos for advanced training. ... 

Anna Komnena s description of the twelfth-century Orphanotropheion, an institution we will study in detail in Chapters Seven and Eight, also includes the only explicit reference to wet nurses in a Byzantine asylum for abandoned children. As an example of the mutual aid given and received by the residents of the great Orphanage, she mentioned not only the crippled led by the healthy and the old served by the young, but also babies nursed by other mothers. By iioo, therefore, the Orphanotropheion of the capital included a section that provided wet nurses for abandoned babies. 

According to a fifth-century story about the Egyptian abbot Gela-sios, his monastery had received at least one child described as a threp-tos. As Theresa Nani has shown, threptos usually referred to an infant, abandoned by his or her parents, who was subsequently found and nursed in the house of another. It is probable, therefore, that Gela-sios s monastery had secured a wet nurse for this boy when he had first come to the community, although the vita does not state this ex-phcitly. ... 

Second, did the Byzantine Empire develop effective methods to assist foundhngs and older abandoned children Again the answer is yes. Both the bishops and monastic communities supported institutions that accepted infants, fotmd them wet nurses, and later educated them... 

The anonymous treatise described another group of mothers who came to the hospital to discuss their family problems. If staff members determined that any one of these women suffered from a chronic illness and would be unable to raise her child, they accepted responsibility for the infant and assigned it a wet nurse. If the staff members determined that a woman could not care for the baby because of poverty, the hospital provided her with sufiBcient money to raise the child at her home. 

In this regard, one should also consider that the anonymous author referred to other foundling homes that accepted babies and found them wet nurses. Were these services run by Greek or Syrian communities in or around Jerusalem that had continued to maintain Byzantine philanthropic institutions throughout the period of Arab domination ... 

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