The English wet-nurse and her role in infant care 1538–1800

Despite the space devoted to studies of European nurses, wet-nursing in England has received scant attention. This is mainly because in some countries, such as France, wet-nursing was regulated by the state and therefore was documented extensively. Also, France and most other Catholic lands had numerous foundling hospitals for which detailed records, often dating from the Middle Ages, survive. But for England, apart from the archive relating to the country nurses of the London Foundling Hospital (founded 1739), and the few remaining records of the nurses employed by Christ's Hospital in the sixteenth century, the evidence is limited and scattered.' How the trade ofwet-nursing was organized and carried on outside these official institutions has received very little attention. Roger Finlay's study of the demography of London (1580-1650) has demonstrated that infants from wealthier parishes were sent out of London to be nursed in country parishes.2 Dorothy McLaren's detailed study of the Buckinghamshire parish of Chesham (1578-1601) has indicated that women who were nursing London infants may have used wet-nursing as a contraceptive technique once