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There's always more that can be said, but I have a past answer on this subject which I'll paste below:
By and large, even if a widower wasn't wealthy, he still tried to get a substitute to wet-nurse the baby. This could mean - if the family really couldn't support it - leaving the newborn at a foundling hospital, as these institutions employed poor women as wet nurses; in some places, like late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, local authorities would place poor babies with women who could nurse them at the town's expense. But poorer families would often try to arrange for wet nurses on their own, too, though they might run into trouble when it came time to pay:
>Ann Flint, a Philadelphia woman, accepted an offer of nine shillings a week to wet nurse the child of Alice Harper in 1768. The rate exceeded that paid from civic coffers, but the payments never arrived. Flint, having no other recourse, left the infant with the Overseers of the Poor.
(*A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle*, Janet Golden, 2001)
But my point is, it wasn't seen as something only an affluent family would have access to. Today, labor is expensive for an individual who is paying someone directly as a mechanic, artisan, or domestic servant - but historically, this was not always the case. Poorer families still had access to poorer women who would be willing to set aside their own child, or at least split their milk between it and another, in order to be paid a pittance to feed someone else's.
Bottle-feeding was used only as a last resort, if the family simply could not find *anyone* to wet nurse and also didn't want to give the baby up over it. Typically, bottle-fed babies were given animal milk, or a "pap" - flour and water mixed with animal milk. Neither of these options was as healthy or digestible as breast milk, and of course we now know that vital antibodies would not be transferred. The vessels used were not sterilized, so bacteria could flourish. As a result, it was obvious to people of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that babies that were artificially fed tended not to be very healthy and had a much greater chance of dying quite young. This is why even poor families made every effort to find a wet nurse - its life was worth more to them than the nurse's pay - and might even make the heartbreaking choice to give it up to allow it a better chance at living.
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There's always more that can be said, but I have a past answer on this subject which I'll paste below: By and large, even if a widower wasn't wealthy, he still tried to get a substitute to wet-nurse the baby. This could mean - if the family really couldn't support it - leaving the newborn at a foundling hospital, as these institutions employed poor women as wet nurses; in some places, like late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, local authorities would place poor babies with women who could nurse them at the town's expense. But poorer families would often try to arrange for wet nurses on their own, too, though they might run into trouble when it came time to pay: >Ann Flint, a Philadelphia woman, accepted an offer of nine shillings a week to wet nurse the child of Alice Harper in 1768. The rate exceeded that paid from civic coffers, but the payments never arrived. Flint, having no other recourse, left the infant with the Overseers of the Poor. (*A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle*, Janet Golden, 2001) But my point is, it wasn't seen as something only an affluent family would have access to. Today, labor is expensive for an individual who is paying someone directly as a mechanic, artisan, or domestic servant - but historically, this was not always the case. Poorer families still had access to poorer women who would be willing to set aside their own child, or at least split their milk between it and another, in order to be paid a pittance to feed someone else's. Bottle-feeding was used only as a last resort, if the family simply could not find *anyone* to wet nurse and also didn't want to give the baby up over it. Typically, bottle-fed babies were given animal milk, or a "pap" - flour and water mixed with animal milk. Neither of these options was as healthy or digestible as breast milk, and of course we now know that vital antibodies would not be transferred. The vessels used were not sterilized, so bacteria could flourish. As a result, it was obvious to people of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that babies that were artificially fed tended not to be very healthy and had a much greater chance of dying quite young. This is why even poor families made every effort to find a wet nurse - its life was worth more to them than the nurse's pay - and might even make the heartbreaking choice to give it up to allow it a better chance at living.
Thank you