ABSTRACT
The significant part wet nursing has played throughout recorded history is in nurturing the 'succourless poor child'. The reasons for infant abandonment were most often social, that is to say, parents were starving or ill or there was a war or plague or they had too many children. Boswell emphasises that infant abandonment was never a moral or ethical issue, and was therefore never condemned. Illegitimacy was another important reason for abandoning an infant, especially if the mother was unmarried. The poor state of health of some of these infants is confirmed in a report on the first intake of infants into Coram's Foundling Hospital in 1745. Ironically, Robert Dingley's argument did in the end help to consolidate the more general arguments against wet nursing. One of the first documents that consider the fate of the wet nurse's baby is to be found in the Bureaux of Wet Nursing in Paris.
