Wet Nurses Research Articles

Appropriate Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices in an Emergency for Non-Breastfed Infants Under Six Months: The Rohingya Experience.

Since 25 August, 2017 over 693,000 Rohingya have been forced from Myanmar due to mass violence, seeking refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. Nutritional surveys during 2017 revealed worrying levels of malnutrition and poor infant feeding practices, including high numbers of infants not exclusively breastfeeding. Infants under 6 months who are not exclusively breastfed are particularly vulnerable to morbidity and mortality and require specialized feeding support, especially in emergency contexts. To describe Save the Children International's experiences supporting wet nursing, relactation, and artificial feeding for non-breastfed infants under 6 months in the Rohingya Response, Bangladesh. A retrospective analysis was conducted of routine program data and documentation from Save the Children International's infant and young child feeding in emergencies interventions for the Rohingya Response, Bangladesh, from November 2017 to April 2018. The study population were infants under 6 months identified as not breastfed during the initial assessment (N = 15). Although wet nursing was attempted with all infants, it was successful with 6 (40%) of the infants. Additionally, 1 (6.7%) infant's mother was able to successfully relactate. The remaining infants ended up requiring feeding with human milk substitutes. Gaps exist in operational guidance to support non-breastfed infants with wet nursing and relactation in emergency settings, as well as on how to operationalize safe human milk substitute programming in line with national policies and regulations. There is an urgent need to address this gap to protect the lives of non-breastfed infants in emergencies worldwide.

Между этикой и физиологией: кормилицы в российском обществе конца XIX — начала XX в.

The article addresses a number of issues related to the profession of wet nurses in pre-Revolutionary Russia. This topic is particularly relevant in connection with the current discussion of the alienation of women’s reproductive function. According to infant care manuals, while choosing a wet nurse, doctors recommended that mothers consider not only physical aspects, but also ethical issues. However, in practice, the ethics receded into the background. Wet nurses were used in almost all families that had reached a certain financial and social status. Doctors’ recommendations were referred to justify the fact that mothers should not feed their own infants. Therefore, such recommendations served to justify an ethically questionable practice. The most serious medical problem was that wet nurses were distributors of syphilis. Many nurses started their work in orphanages where they contracted syphilis from infected foundling babies. As it was impossible to diagnose syphilis at the early stages, the infected wet nurse would become the carrier of the disease and, when hired by a family, infect the customer’s child. The article is based on the materials in the Odessa province.

OSMANLI DEVLETİ VE KÜLTÜR COĞRAFYASINDA SÜTANNELİK

OSMANLI DEVLETİ VE KÜLTÜR COĞRAFYASINDA SÜTANNELİK

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Reviewed by: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers Jeff Forret They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers contends that southern, white, slave-owning women were as deeply invested in the institution of slavery as anyone in the U.S. South. The women she writes about were not subordinate onlookers, femes covert, or deputy husbands, but rather “mistresses of the market” (xiv) who owned, governed, and traded enslaved people in their own right and reaped the profits of captive labor. In advancing an argument that southern white women were complicit in slaveholding and, by extension, the development of American capitalism, Jones-Rogers’s work contributes in equal measure to the scholarship on both nineteenth-century women and slavery. In her introduction, Jones-Rogers carefully spells out the target of her investigation: not “the wealthiest single or widowed women” (xi) of the antebellum South, but married women who owned and maintained control over enslaved property. She accesses them using court cases and other legal records, correspondence, and newspapers, but her most important sources are the slave narratives that allow her to recover the voices of those whom slave-owning women held in bondage. The benefit of viewing slave-owning women through the lens of enslaved people is that Jones-Rogers’s study does not focus on only the most elite female slaveholders in the South. Relatively less prosperous but more numerous non-elite slave owners are central to the book. They Were Her Property is divided into eight topical chapters. Jones-Rogers first traces the process through which young girls, “mistresses in the making” (1), were acculturated into the slave system and learned the power dynamics at play in southern society. It further discusses how slave-owning women came to possess enslaved people of their own. The doctrine of coverture did not function in practice as thoroughly as the written law might suggest, leaving pathways for married women to manage enslaved property independently. And, as Jones-Rogers makes clear, slave-owning women exercised the powers southern society conferred upon masters. They bought and sold enslaved people in private transactions or at slave auctions. They administered punishments, at times with the same brutality as slaveholding men, and extracted forced labor from their enslaved workforces. Jones-Rogers classifies wet nursing as a uniquely exploitive form of skilled labor foisted upon enslaved women at the expense of black infants. Countering Sally McMillen’s work on elite southern white women, she finds the practice of using enslaved wet nurses widespread among non-elite slave-owning women. In the final chapters of the book, Jones-Rogers explains how the South’s slave-owning women navigated the Civil War’s [End Page 476] challenges to slaveholding, perhaps by selling their enslaved property or by becoming refugees with them in Texas or other areas deemed safer for the preservation of the slave regime, and how they suffered economically as a consequence of emancipation. Jones-Rogers offers a bold reinterpretation of the relationship between slavery and slave-owning women in the nineteenth-century South. The prose in They Were Her Property is strong and clear, containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery. Her far-reaching research engages such seldom-studied topics as “ladies auctions” and slave-owning female brothel operators. The sweeping geographical coverage of the book may disguise some regional variations among slave-owning women’s practices, however, and in a few instances, slave-owning men lurking in the examples imply the persistent social constraints their wives confronted. Still, as Jones-Rogers shows, nineteenth-century slaveholding households were not as patriarchal as has been assumed. The South’s married, slave-owning women were thoroughly enmeshed in the world of slavery and were also the direct economic beneficiaries of its fruits. Their financial ties to bondage as an institution meant that “they were not passive bystanders” to the slave system, but “co-conspirators” in it (205). Jeff Forret Lamar University Copyright © 2020...

Long-term neurological effects of neonatal caffeine treatment in a rabbit model of preterm birth.

Neonatal caffeine treatment might affect brain development. Long-term studies show conflicting results on brain-related outcomes. Herein we aimed to investigate the long-term effects of neonatal caffeine administration in a rabbit model of preterm birth. Preterm (born day 29) and term (day 32) pups were raised by wet nurses and allocated to treatment with saline or caffeine for 7 or 17 days. At pre-puberty, neurobehavioral tests were performed and brains were harvested for immunostaining of neurons, synapses, myelin, and astrocytes. Survival was lower in preterm saline pups than in controls, whereas caffeine-treated preterm pups did not differ from term control pups. Preterm saline pups covered less distance compared to controls and were more likely to stay in the peripheral zone of the open field. Corresponding differences were not seen in preterm caffeine pups. Preterm animals had lower neuron density compared to controls, which was not influenced by caffeine treatment. Synaptic density, astrocytes, and myelin were not different between groups. Caffeine appeared to be safe. All preterm rabbits had lower neuron density but anxious behavior seen in preterm saline rabbits was not seen in caffeine-treated preterm pups.

Wet Nurse in art in Graeco-Roman Egypt

The wet nurse is a woman employed to breast-feed another woman's baby other than her own, for certain salary. This profession was very important to most of the ancient families in Egypt, especially in Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Egypt. Most of the information about wet nurses is sourced from the reliefs shown on the walls of the temples and tombs, minor art exhibited in the galleries of the different museums, and from the contracts mentioned in the ancient papyrus especially the Oxyrhynchuspapyri. Wet nurse in Pharaonic Egypt has very essential role, either in divinity or in social society. She is very important for the king to insure his royal rights. Private wet nurses are also used among the upper classes; they are also depicted on the walls of tombs, showing signs of love to their owners. Many details were given about wet nurses and wet nursing as an important profession in Egypt during the Greek and Roman times. This section of the study depends on contracts preserved in the ancient papyrus that provides us with a lot of information about this profession, also the physician Soranus was one of the most interested Greek doctor, who gives many details about wet nurses. The paper is supported by a catalogue of the representation of wet nurses in Greek and Roman Egyptian art. It deals with Divine Wet nurse in Greek and Roman Egypt, especially Hathor and Isis. The representations of divine wet nurses in temples' relief as Dendra, Edfu, Philae and Armant. And in minor art.

From Farm to Table: The Foodways Connection Between Rural and Urban Women in Syria After World War I

Syrian rural poor and urban women experienced the rupture of World War I in vastly different ways, but they were linked across class and region through the country’s foodways. Due to economic instability, more rural women were forced into agricultural labor. The food crops they produced were in turn served by women across the country to their families. Though their burden was not comparable to that of agricultural laborers, middle-class Syrian women were also faced with greater responsibilities in the postwar era. A new emphasis was placed on the centrality of the mother in the life of her children. Women were urged to refrain from pursuing employment and entertainment in the public sphere in favor of staying home, caring for children, and preparing family meals. The use of domestic help and wet nurses, which had been common among families of means, was discouraged. While men were viewed as the frontline force in building the modern nation and its economy, women’s domestic and paid labor became even more marginalized in the national narrative. It is by looking behind closed doors and at the production of food that women’s roles in nurturing the nation can be told.

Other Mothers’ Milk: From Wet Nursing to Human Milk Banking in England, 1900-1950

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the continuities between wet nursing and the emergence of human milk banking in England in the first half of the twentieth century. It revisits the assumption that wet nursing had disappeared in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, and focuses attention on a continuing, albeit diminished, practice of private wet nursing after 1900 and the re-emergence of the institutional employment of lactating mothers in the interwar period. The article explores how changes in infant welfare preoccupations, medical views of breastfeeding and breast milk, and conceptualisations of the lactating body were embedded in the development from wet nursing to human milk banking.

Breastfeeding support through wet nursing during nutritional emergency: A cross sectional study from Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.

This study examined the best practices with regard to infant and young child feeding in emergency (IYCF-E) program. This was done by observing a breastfeeding support scenario through wet nursing in Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Information on demographics, IYCF-E knowledge, wet nursing support, type of constraints faced, and possible ways to overcome such constraints was collected through face-to-face interviews with 24 conveniently selected wet nurses. Linear regression was used to analyze the associations. Mean age of wet nurses was 21.6 years; 16.67% had adequate knowledge about IYCF-E; and 29.17% had prior knowledge about wet nursing. Mean age of supported infants was 1.29 months, and 58.33% had a familial relationship with the wet nurses. Duration of breastfeeding support was significantly associated with the wet nurse's age, age of the wet nurses' youngest children, familial relationship with infants, knowledge about IYCF-E, and follow-ups from community nutrition workers (Ps <0.05). The status of facing problems (58.33%) was negatively correlated with duration of wet nursing, although this association was not statistically significant. The most extensively reported problems were as follows: misunderstandings with the infant's family (85.71%), family workload and time limitations (21.43%), household distance (42.86%), and family members' poor compliance (21.43%). Counseling from community nutrition workers (64.29%) and mediation by community leaders (57.14%) played key roles in mitigating such problems. Self-satisfaction (37.50%), counseling (62.50%), and religious inspiration (58.33%) were key motivators behind dedicated breastfeeding support. Wet nursing in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, was associated with several factors involving both supply and demand. The present findings may help design better IYCF-E programs in similar context.

Nature as Norm in Medieval Medical Discussions of Maternal Breastfeeding and Wet-Nursing

Medieval discussions about breastfeeding were saturated with moral and social meanings and arguments about how a good mother should behave and what makes for a happy, healthy baby. At the center was the question of who should breastfeed, the mother or a wet nurse. While the church sanctioned maternal breastfeeding as a moral norm, recourse to wet nurses was the norm for elites, and the custom spread in the later Middle Ages to the middling segments of society. Medieval physicians formulated their advice according to their understanding of the moral and normative authority of nature, but also in complex dialogue with contemporary pastoral theory and moral philosophy (which rejected wet-nursing), as well as contemporary social practices, values, and beliefs. Physicians recognized maternal breastfeeding as the best and most natural option because of the physiological continuity between gestation and lactation, yet their advice was adapted to the social realities of their patrons and patients by giving guidance about choosing a good wet nurse and controling her manner of life. Contrary to what is often claimed or supposed, the notion that the milk of amoral and bad-mannered wet nurses might lead to the degeneration of children did not originate from Galenic physiology but from nonmedical sources. Physicians themselves were reticent about attributing quasi-hereditary powers to mother’s milk, insisting instead on the dangers of neglect in the care of infants.

Good Questions 7: How Should Human Milk Banks be Regulated?

The term “human milk” refers to breastmilk used for purposes other than feeding a mother’s own infant, usually to directly meet the needs of other women’s infants especially those who are critically ill. Historically, milk sharing has been done primarily through wet nursing, but human milk banking has been growing rapidly since the beginning of the twentieth century.&#x0D; There are concerns because some banks operate in ways that are exploitative, unsanitary, or provide milk to people who use it for questionable purposes. There is a clear need for regulation of milk banking, not only to limit undesired practices but also to facilitate good practices. This essay suggests a framework for legislation that supports milk banks in achieving their goals while also ensuring that the public’s interests are served.

La lactancia asalariada en el siglo xvi: las nodrizas del Hospital Real de Guadix

Contrariamente a la idea generalizada del fracaso de las nodrizas que trabajaban para o en los hospitales, muy extendida en los estudios del siglo xviii, un hallazgo casi inesperado de las fuentes y que consideramos destacable por la escasez de estudios sobre las mujeres del siglo xvi en el norte del Reino de Granada, nos permite presentar la actividad de las nodrizas para expositos, como laboral, reglada y fuente de recursos para ellas y las familias. La mujer es protagonista en todo el proceso productivo y en la estructura laboral, figurando con nombre propio en el cobro, independientemente de su estado civil. Asi, en un intervalo de tan solo ocho anos, hemos conocido la identidad de mas de un centenar de mujeres, que en Guadix y su tierra, han sido contratadas por una institucion que las valora de forma optima y cuyo exito laboral tendra repercusiones sociales y economicas para la comunidad. Por otra parte, tampoco hemos comprobado diferencias de sexo, ni en el abandono de expositos, ni en la acogida ni la supervivencia de ninas y ninos, como se pone de manifiesto en otros estudios.

Maternal Thyroid Hormone Deficiency During Gestation and Lactation Alters Metabolic and Thyroid Programming of the Offspring in the Adult Stage.

Environmental stimuli during critical developmental stages establish long-term physiological and structural patterns that "program" health during adult life. Little is known about how alterations in hormonal supply might have consequences in metabolic and thyroid programming. This work aims to prove that alterations in the supply of thyroid hormones during gestation and lactation have long-term consequences in the metabolic and thyroid programming of the offspring. Female Wistar rats were divided into euthyroid, hypothyroid, and hypothyroid with 20 μg/day of s.c. thyroxine (T4), replacement wet nurses. Rats were mating, and after birth, pups were grouped according to their wet nurses group. Milk quality of wet nurses was assessed on days 7, 14, and 21. Body mass gain and energy intake of the offspring were monitored for 28 weeks after weaning. At sacrifice, we extracted and weighed their thyroid gland and adipose reserves, and collected blood to measure its metabolic and thyroid profiles. Hypothyroid wet nurses presented a persistent low quality of milk, while both male and female hypothyroid offspring presented lower body mass gain, higher blood glucose, dyslipidemia, hyperinsulinemia, and hyperleptinemia, as well as lower total adipose reserves, but higher visceral reserve, diminished T3 and T4 concentrations, and lower weight of thyroid gland. Thyroxine replacement prevented all changes in both wet nurses and pups. We conclude that maternal thyroid hormone deficiency during congenital and lactation stages alters the metabolic and thyroid programming of the offspring, while the reestablishment of maternal thyroid status during critical periods of development can prevent these alterations.

Hypothyroid offspring replacement with euthyroid wet nurses during lactation improves thyroid programming without modifying metabolic programming.

Determine the milk quality effect during lactation on the metabolic and thyroid programming of hypothyroid offspring. Ten-week-old female Wistar rats were divided into two groups: euthyroid and thyroidectomy-caused hypothyroidism. The rats were matted and, one day after birth, the pups were divided into three groups: euthyroid offspring (EO), hypothyroid offspring (HO) and hypothyroid with a euthyroid replacement wet nurse (HRO). During lactation, the milk quality and offspring body length were evaluated. The body weight and energy intake were determined on a weekly basis, as well as the metabolic profile at the prepubertal (P35-36) and postpubertal (P55-56) ages. At P56, the animals were sacrificed, the adipose tissues were weighed and the thyroid glands were dissected for histological processing. The milk of the hypothyroid wet nurse decreases proteins (16-26%), lipids (22-29%) and lactate (22-37%) with respect to euthyroid. The HO has a lower body weight gain (23-33%), length (11-13%) and energy intake (15-21%). In addition, HO presents impaired fasting glucose and dyslipidemia, as well as a reduction in seric thyroid hormone (18-34%), adipose reserves (26-68%) and thyroid gland weight (25-34%). The HO present thyroid gland cytoarchitecture alteration. The HRO develop the same metabolic alterations as the HO. However, the thyroid gland dysfunction was partially prevented because the HRO improved under about 10% of the serum thyroid hormone concentration, the thyroid gland weight although histological glandular changes presented. The replacement of hypothyroid offspring with a euthyroid wet nurse during lactation can improve the thyroid programming without modifying metabolic programming.

Expressing Motherhood: Wet Nursing and Human Milk Banking in Brazil.

In early twentieth-century Brazil the proponents of human milk banking considered this development to signal the end of wet nursing and the start of a whole new day, one altogether better for the paid donors of human milk, their children, and the children in need of human milk. But wet nursing persisted alongside the new human milk banks for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, as this paper argues, the organizers and directors of milk banks drew on and constructed ideas about wet nursing, and about the generations of poor Afro-Brazilian women who had performed this labor, in the design and operation of the first milk banks.

Womanism and Women in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

African-American women have been inappropriately and unduly, stereotyped in various contrasting images as slaves post-slavery, wet nurses, super women, domestic helpers, mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, hoochies, welfare recipients, and hot bodies which discloses their repression in the United States of America. They have been showcased by both black men and white women in different ways quite contrary to their being in America. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, to name a few writers, have put forth the condition of black women through their works. They have shown the personality of many a black women hidden behind the veils of racism, sexism, classism and systemic oppression of different sorts. Walker coined the term Womanism in her 1984 collection of essays titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Womanism advocates consensus for black women starting with gender and proceeding over to race, ethnicity and class, with a universal outlook. Womanism offers a positive self-definition of the black woman’s self within gendered, historical, geographical, ethnic, racial and cultural contexts too. Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar 1989 is a womanist treatise putting forth the importance of womanist consciousness and womanist spirit. The novel is a tribute to the strength, endurance and vitality of black womanhood. The novel revolves around three pairs of characters and their lives to showcase the lives of African Americans and coloured population in America. The three couples namely Suwelo and Fanny, Arveyda and Carlotta, Lissie and Hal showcased in the novel, belong to different age groups and different, mixed ethnicities. Through them, Walker depicts the lives of marginalized population in America, and the umpteen trials they face for being who they are. Furthermore, this paper showcases how Womanism as a theory can really enliven the life of the black community, especially black women when put into practice.

Mamki – najemne karmicielki w świetle literatury poradnikowej z drugiej połowy XIX i początku XX wieku

Wet nurses, i.e. hired breast-feeders of babies, were the subject matter of this research. It aims to systematize the advice that was formulated on the pages of “how-to” books regarding the search for, recruitment, and treatment of wet nurses in the homes of one’s charges. The specific duties of wet nurses that were especially expected of them are determined, as well as the errors most frequently committed in their performance, which the authors of how-to books described at length, in order to warn mothers against the incompetence of paid breast-feeders. A comparison of the views of authors of “how-to” books over nearly 70 years will allow us to determine a possible evolution of views regarding wet nursing. The “how-to” books on health, hygiene, and education from the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century (the period approximately from 1850-1918), published in Polish areas and addressed mainly at families, especially mothers, form the source material for the research. The use of this type of literature will allow us to reconstruct the promulgated image of wet nursing without broader reference to providing help for them, which is worth confronting with the “how-to” recommendations, attempting to determine whether, and to what extent, they were reflected in everyday life (e.g. using epistolary or archival sources, and memoirs). Nevertheless, the authors of “how-to” books also referred to the practice of tending infants and young children, criticizing inappropriate behaviour of wet nurses, while the recommendations formulated by them were to remedy inappropriate behaviour occurring in reality. The issue of wet nursing has not hitherto been analysed in detail in Polish historiography. In recent years, though, a few texts or papers in which one can find more or less extensive information (the less extensive ones predominate) related to breastfeeding by wet nurses in the Polish areas in the Middle Ages, the period of Old Poland, or the partition period, have been published. Thus, it seems even more reasonable to explore this issue, which will help to fill a gap in the development of the history of breastfeeding, nursing, and tending infants and small children.

『うつほ物語』における乳母への忌避 ――仲忠の幼時体験と関連して――

『うつほ物語』における乳母への忌避 ――仲忠の幼時体験と関連して――

Royal Wet Nurses in Seventh- and Early Eighth-Century China: Historiographical Evaluation and Narrative Construction

AbstractThe women who served as wet nurses to powerful and in some cases notorious members of the Tang royal family appear in written materials in various capacities in relation to prominent historical actors. An analysis of historical narratives involving these women indicates that their portrayals were strongly influenced by the historian’s mode of moral assessment, in particular, the historical judgment meted out upon their controversial charges. The manipulation in historical narrative of royal wet nurses thus elucidates a fascinating example of the operation of “praise and blame” in traditional historiography. Wet nurses are used as narrative pawns to emphasize the historical judgment of their famous former charges and become a vehicle or mouthpiece for historical evaluation.

(Re)productive Tensions: Aletheiac Revealing in Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”

Martin Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art moves beyond an aesthetic reading of the artwork that focuses on questions of judgment towards a hermeneutical understanding of art as a realm where truth happens. Such a truth presents itself as an aletheiac unfolding of the strife between Earth and World, a tension revelatory of our historical situation. To better understand this truth, Heidegger turns to a painting of Van Gogh’s shoes, providing an account of the artwork that moves beyond the “thingly” character of the shoes to its “equipmental being”. That he attributes Van Gogh’s shoes to a peasant woman is telling in that her being female points to a gendered relation between woman and Earth. However, in only focusing on the equipmental being of her shoes and her labor in the fields, a historical truth about the tension between her labor of reproduction and production, a strain inherent in the Earth/World dynamic becomes eclipsed. This tension is felt as a reckoning of, not only one’s finitude, but of one’s natality. Heidegger looks to Van Gogh’s shoes and analyzes how toils in the field set up a world; however, as Gaston Bachelard notes, “Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as claimed by certain hasty metaphysicians, man is laid in the cradle of the house.2” To explore our natal origin that begins in the cradle and stretches along to our death, this paper presents a hermeneutical reading of two works of art, Berthe Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”, suggesting that in seeking an origin of the work of art and the tension that resides there, an understanding of reproduction (and its relation to production) should complement Heidegger’s treatment of the artwork.