1 Answer

Wet Nursing is when someone else breastfeeds your baby on a permanent basis. There is a long and complicated history regarding wet nursing: it probably started in ancient times when a mother died during child birth and another woman breastfed & raise the motherless baby. Group nursing is when a baby is passed around and breastfed by many woman (very rare in modern times, but happened all the time in the past). By the 16th to 18 century, it became unfashionable to breastfeed your baby. Some of this came from the fact that Royalty wanted large families with 10+ children. The birth mother would hire one or more wet nurses to feed the newborn so she herself could regain fertility and get pregnant again. Since royalty didn't breastfeed their own, other women of wealth did the same. This led to the attitude that breastfeeding was only done by the poor & lower class.

When baby formulas were commercially available, wet nurses were needed less and less. In the 1980’s, it was discovered that AIDS and other viruses could be transferred in breast milk: the use of wet nurses was even less. [This is true in United States, but in developing countries, wet nurses are still very common].

http://www.breastfeeding-mom.com/wet-nurse.html