Breastfeeding other families' infants was for centuries one of the few paid caring trades open to women, regulated closely enough that Hammurabi's Code and later Paris's municipal wet-nurse bureaus set its terms. Safe pasteurized milk, rubber-nippled feeding bottles and commercial infant formula collapsed the trade in the early twentieth century; today's hospital milk banks are its distant, anonymous descendant.
Wet nurse no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1854 – 1945
Reform, registration and war
Kaiserswerth's training model, Nightingale's Crimean fame and her 1860 school at St Thomas' turned nursing into a respectable trained vocation within a single generation. New Zealand's 1901 registration act made it a licensed profession; Britain followed in 1919 after decades of campaigning by Ethel Gordon Fenwick. Two world wars then put tens of thousands of nurses in uniform near the front lines — Edith Cavell's execution in 1915 made one of them an international symbol.
What else was happening then
1901
New Zealand registers the world's first nurses
New Zealand's Nurses Registration Act, championed by public-health administrator Grace Neill, makes it the first country to require state registration of nurses. On 10 January 1902, Ellen Dougherty of Palmerston North becomes the world's first registered nurse; Britain followed in 1919, and registration became the global norm within decades.
1965
The first nurse practitioner program
Nurse Loretta Ford and pediatrician Henry Silver create the first nurse practitioner program at the University of Colorado, training experienced nurses to diagnose, treat and manage care for children in underserved areas. The advanced-practice model spread worldwide; nurse practitioners now hold full independent practice authority in more than half of US states.
2020
The Year of the Nurse meets COVID-19
The WHO designates 2020 — Nightingale's bicentenary — the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife and publishes its first State of the World's Nursing report, counting some 28 million nurses and a 5.9-million shortfall. The COVID-19 pandemic then makes nursing's centrality, and its burnout and attrition crisis, visible worldwide.
Where that work lives now
Healthcare's largest profession: from Scutari's lamp to the ICU monitor, the person who is still at the bedside when everyone else has gone home.
💉 Nurse →