The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.