ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a brief historical survey of wet nursing. The brief outline on the history of the wet nurse of the privileged shows a social and psychological conflict that lies at the heart of wet nursing among the privileged. It has been suggested that the treatment of the Spanish wet nurse may have been influenced by the status wet nurses were given by the Muslim religion as it spread across Spain and influenced medieval thinking. Aulus Gellius, a contempory of Tacitus and Pliny in the second century AD, suggested that the wet nurse came between the mother and child and he reprimanded those mothers who allowed their children to be fed by a wet nurse. There are other people claims that the wet nurse was used more extensively by the rich middle class in Catholic countries such as France and Italy.
