How was the English wet nurse conceptualised and understood in the context of disease transmission in the eighteenth century?

Wet nurses were increasingly vilified in the second half of the eighteenth century as transmitters of syphilis and therefore significant threats to their nurslings, the structure of the family, and even the future of the British race.

Venereal contagion through wet nursing was indeed a real threat, therefore this condemnation resulted in a long-lasting shift towards maternal breastfeeding.

However, there has been limited exploration of how English wet nurses were represented as either victims or vectors of syphilis, especially in the context of the changing relationship between maternity and sexuality throughout the eighteenth century.

This project therefore aims to determine how the discursive construction of wet nursing influenced attitudes not only towards nurses themselves but also towards motherhood, female sexuality, and popular understandings of venereal disease as a moral and medical threat, in order to better understand the influence that syphilis had on the decline of wet nursing.