“A necessary evil?”: the wet nurses and the medical-hygienist speech in last decades of the 19th century

Abstract

This article analyses different discourses about the work of wet nurses hired by the Santa Casa de Misericordia de Salvador during the last decades of the 19th century. Based on Santa Casa's sources and the newspapers, especially Gazeta Medica da Bahia and O Monitor, we intend to understand the daily life and survival strategies of these working women, mostly of them poor and ‘coloured’, in a context shaped by the decline of the proslavery system and emergence of medical-hygienic knowledge with child care. This context was also specifically featured by attempts of regulation of the wet nurses working and ideas about breastfeeding mercenary as a backward custom not consistent with modern practices from doctors and authorities.

Keywords

• wet nurses
• child care
• urban labour