Member 4 Subsection 1 Non-necessary, remote, external, adventitious or accidental causes: first, the nurse.

I have discussed those remote, external, surrounding, necessary causes sufficiently in the preceding member. The non-necessary causes follow. Of these, Fuchs says, no systematic art can be formed because they are uncertain, accidental and so numerous. They are called non-necessary because, according to Fernel, they may be avoided or made use of without necessity. Many of the accidental causes I shall discuss here might well have been placed in the former class, because they cannot be avoided but happen to us by chance, accidentally and unexpectedly, at one time or another. The rest are contingent and unavoidable, and more properly placed in this class of causes. It is impossible to list them all; I shall therefore speak briefly, in order, of some of the more remarkable contingent causes that produce melancholy.

From a child’s birth, the first misfortune of this kind likely to befall him is a bad nurse, through whom alone he may be infected with this malady from his cradle. Aulus Gellius, book 12, chapter 1, introduces that eloquent philosopher Favorinus, proving at length that milk has the same power and properties as seed, not only in human beings but in all other creatures.

He gives the example of a kid and a lamb: if either drinks the other’s milk, the lamb drinking the goat’s, or the kid the ewe’s, the wool of the one will be hard and the hair of the other soft. Gerald of Wales confirms this in his Journey through Wales, book 1, chapter 2, with a remarkable example from his own time. A female piglet happened to suckle a female hound, and when it grew up it would hunt every kind of deer wonderfully well—as well as, or rather better than, any ordinary hound. His conclusion is that human beings and animals share the nature and disposition of the female whose milk feeds them.

Favorinus presses the point further and demonstrates it more clearly: if a nurse is misshapen, unchaste, dishonest, shameless, drunken, cruel or the like, the child who sucks at her breast will be so too. All other affections of the mind and diseases—pox, leprosy, melancholy and so on—are almost grafted, as it were, and imprinted into the infant’s constitution by the nurse’s milk.

For some such reason Cato used to have his servants’ children suck at his wife’s breast, because this would make them love him and his family better and, in all likelihood, get along with them. No clearer example that minds are altered by milk could be given than Dion’s account of Caligula’s cruelty. It could be blamed on neither father nor mother, but solely on his cruel nurse, who always smeared her nipples with blood when he suckled. This made him such a murderer, reproducing her cruelty to a hair.

And there is Tiberius, who was a habitual drunkard because his nurse was one. “And if she is witless,” one observer says, “she will make the infant witless.” If she is a fool or dullard, the child she nurses will take after her or be harmed in some other way, as Francesco Barbaro proves fully in the last chapter of book 2 of On Marriage, and Antonio de Guevara in book 2 of his Marcus Aurelius: the child will surely share her qualities.

As for bodily sickness, there can be no doubt. Titus, Vespasian’s son, was sickly because his nurse was so—Lampridius. And, if we may believe physicians, children often catch the pox from a bad nurse: Botallo, chapter 61 of On Venereal Disease. Besides, poor care, negligence and many serious failings to which nurses are prone may expose the child to great danger.

For these reasons Aristotle, in Politics, book 7, chapter 17, Favorinus and Marcus Aurelius would have no child put out to nurse at all, but every mother bring up her own, whatever her station. For a healthy mother capable of nursing to send her child out to nurse is “a disorder of nature”, as Guazzo calls it. She should therefore nurse the child herself. The mother will be more careful, loving and attentive than any serving-woman or such hired creatures: everyone acknowledges this. “It is most fitting”—as Rodrigo de Castro acknowledges at length in On the Nature of Women, book 4, chapter 12—“for the mother herself to suckle the infant.” Who denies that it should be so?

Some women observe this most scrupulously. Among them was that queen of France, a Spaniard by birth, who was so strict and zealous in this matter that, when another nurse had suckled her child in her absence, she would not rest until she had made the infant vomit the milk up again. But she was too possessive.

If, as often happens, children must be sent out because the mother is unfit or unable to nurse, I would advise such mothers—as Plutarch does in On the Education of Children, and St Jerome in book 2, letter 27, to Laeta on bringing up her daughter; Magninus in part 2, chapter 7 of his Regimen of Health; and the same Rodrigo—to choose a healthy, honest woman of a good constitution, free from bodily diseases and, if possible, from all passions and disturbances of the mind, such as sorrow, fear, grief, folly and melancholy. For such passions corrupt the milk and alter the child’s constitution, which, being as yet “wet and soft clay”, readily takes an impression and is distorted.

And if such a nurse can be found, diligent and careful as well, then let Favorinus and Marcus Aurelius argue against it as they will: in some cases I would rather choose her than the mother herself. The physician Bonaccioli and the political writer Nicolas Biesius, in book 4, chapter 8 of On the Commonwealth, approve the same view: some nurses are greatly to be preferred to some mothers.

For why may not the mother be wicked, a bad-tempered drunken hussy, a waspish, angry slattern, a deranged creature, a fool—as many mothers are—and as unsound as the nurse? There is more choice of nurses than of mothers. Therefore, unless the mother is thoroughly virtuous, steady, a woman of excellent abilities and a healthy constitution, I would have all children in such cases entrusted to sensible women outside the family.

And this is the only way—just as through marriage they are grafted into other families to change the stock—if anything is wrong with the mother, to prevent diseases and future maladies, and to correct and moderate the child’s disordered constitution inherited from his parents, as Luis Mercado argues in volume 2, in his book On Hereditary Diseases. This is an excellent remedy if a good choice is made of such a nurse.