Wet nurse

A woman who breastfeeds and often cares for a child who is not her own, usually in exchange for payment or other support.

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Wet nursing in ancient Rome: The practice of employing women to breastfeed infants in ancient Roman society. Roman contracts and advice reveal how families arranged and judged wet-nursing relationships.
Cross-nursing: Breastfeeding another person’s child, whether by arrangement, custom, or necessity. Wet nursing is a paid or formalized form of this broader practice.
Breastfeeding: The feeding of an infant with milk produced by a lactating person. Wet nursing is breastfeeding across a caregiving relationship rather than within the birth parent–child pair.
Direct breastfeeding by the birth parent: Feeding an infant at the breast by the person who gave birth to them. This was the alternative wet nursing displaced or supplemented in many households.
Wet nursing in medieval Europe: The use of hired breastfeeding in European households during the Middle Ages. Medieval medical writing and household records document changing expectations for nurses and mothers.
Human milk bank: An organization that screens, pasteurizes, and distributes donated human milk, usually for infants with medical needs. Milk banks provide human milk without assigning a nurse to breastfeed an individual child.
Milk kinship: A social relationship created in some cultures through breastfeeding by the same woman. A nurse’s milk could establish kinship ties that extended beyond biological descent.
Expressed breast milk: Human milk removed from the breast and fed to an infant by another method. Expressed milk transfers feeding without requiring a nurse to breastfeed directly.
Foundling hospital: An institution that received abandoned or orphaned infants, often arranging their care with wet nurses. Foundling hospitals made wet nursing a large-scale system of infant care.
Breast milk sharing: The informal or organized exchange of expressed breast milk between families. Milk sharing can meet feeding needs that wet nursing once addressed through direct breastfeeding.