Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2008
Information is collected from the literature on the age at which British children were weaned from the breast between 1500 and 1800. The weaning age recommended by ‘professionals’ was compared with that said by contemporaries to be common, and with those found in a sample of 42 children. A significant decrease was found in the length of suckling particularly after 1750; this was possibly related to the availability and social acceptability of artificial feeding, an increase in the incidence of maternal suckling among upper and middle class women, and the effects of industrialization. The reason for weaning was individual to each nursing couple; no significant difference was found between the weaning age of males and females, or between wet nursed and maternally breast-fed infants; the weaning age within families was not significantly different from a sample of unrelated children within the same period. Between 1650 and 1800 the weaning age recommended by medical writers was apparently representative of actual practice.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.