Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair

Girls who had gotten themselves "into trouble" in the village became surrogate breast-feeders for women who could not or did not want to breast-feed their own newborns. Well-to-do mothers preferred to have their babies nourished by a wet nurse. It was much more convenient than to have to be on tap around the clock. Besides, breast-feeding was considered to be degrading: it made you into a sort of milch cow. And for birth mothers who could not nurse their babies, a substitute was almost a necessity because there was no such thing as a formula to feed newborns.

Many years later, when the name Freud had entered the vocabulary of the educated and especially the semi-educated, people traced all kinds of real or imaginary psychological and physiological afflictions back to their wet nurses. As an adult, did you suffer from rheumatism, drug addiction,…hypochondria? Sure—it was all the wet nurse's fault: through her milk, you became predisposed to this disorder or that affliction, and so on, ad absurdum. By the time we were born, fashions had changed, and women were encouraged to breast-feed their babies. My mother went at it vigorously because, as she told me later, "I wanted to override the bad genes your father has contributed to your existence."

Doris Drucker: Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair.
The University of Chicago Press.