The politics of health in India

introduction of satisfactory artificial feeding, such sustenance was also a vital factor in the lives of orphans and foundlings, for whom the alternative was direct feeding from such animals as goats. That the subject can sustain an entire book may seem surprising; however, recognizing its potential during research for her earlier work, Breasts, bottles and babies, Valerie Fildes has produced an intriguing study of the mechanism whereby many thousands of babies were nourished by total strangers. This meant being raised among the families of married country women or, as was more common from the nineteenth century, by wet nurses resident in the babies' own homes. From a survey of a wide range of publications including early printed works, together with manuscript sources pertaining mainly to the London Foundling Hospital, Dr Fildes covers such aspects as wet nursing in antiquity, in the American colonies, at its height in England in the seventeenth century and, finally, its demise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries following medical campaigns and the encouragement of maternal breast-feeding. In view of the fact that wet nursing was a widespread, well-paid occupation, the chapter on the occupational disease of wet nurses, which is restricted to a narrow period and almost solely to quotations, deserved expansion. Wet nursing and many related aspects of child care have been treated in depth and the book also examines medical and social issues wider than its title conveys.