The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.