Talmudic Tales & Male Wet Nurses: A Short History
History has a marvelous habit of humbling our certainties. You think you know what a culture does with a body part, and then an old book or a dusty medical report pops up and says, with a grin, “Not quite.” If adult nursing feels like a strange new doorway, take heart: people have been opening similar doors for centuries, sometimes in ways that will make you laugh and sometimes in ways that settle you into a very old, very human truth—nurture is adaptable.
Let’s begin with stories that look like they belong in a cabinet of curiosities. Ancient religious and legal texts — yes, even those weighty, austere pages — sometimes record odd miracles and survival measures. One such tale, preserved in older manuscript traditions, tells of a crisis in which a man’s body, against all expected biology, produced milk to feed an infant when no other source was available. Read as literal miracle or as a witness to the surprising plasticity of the human body, the story insists on a simple point: biology can be coaxed, and nurture will sometimes bend the rules to survive.
Move forward a few centuries and geography, and you’ll find similarly surprising reports. In famine-stricken communities, desperate ingenuity reconfigured role and expectation: there are documented accounts of men acting as wet nurses, using consistent suckling and stimulation to coax their bodies into producing. These were not performed for novelty. They were practical, life-saving—an expression of care that, in the face of scarcity, redefined masculine and feminine expectation in the most intimate terms.
And then there’s the machinery of modernity. The earliest breast pumps were not sleek clinical devices but hand-cranked contraptions that more closely resembled 19th-century coffee grinders than the whisper-quiet units of today. They were awkward, sometimes comical, and a little heroic in the way human beings always find tools to extend care beyond habit or circumstance. The Victorian “boob crank” makes a certain kind of historical sense: industrializing bodies, industrializing care — you can almost imagine a workshop where ingenuity and necessity meet in a rattle of gears.
Why tell these stories? Not to romanticize or sensationalize, but to widen the frame. The history of nursing — adult nursing included — is not a single narrow path but a braided river, fed by pragmatic survival, cultural ritual, and emotional invention. That braided river tells us three useful things for our own relationships:
Nurture is resilient. Humans have found ways to keep others alive and comforted under astonishing circumstances. If a body can be taught to nurture in crisis, it can also be taught to nurture in tenderness.
Roles are inventions, not laws. What seems fixed (who nurtures, how, and when) is often a cultural script rather than a biological imperative. History erases the arrogance of “that’s how it’s always been.”
Curiosity is permission. Those old stories encourage us to ask, gently and without shame, what our bodies and relationships might be capable of when given attention and consent.
A small practical note for anyone reading this with curiosity (and goosebumps): historical accounts and early devices are fascinating, but they’re not recipes. They’re invitations to think differently about nurture, not blueprints. If you’re considering induced lactation or any physiological experiment, do it slowly, with support and medical guidance. The history is full of human courage — but modern care is kinder when it’s informed.
For the lovers and the experimenters, these tales are not an excuse to be reckless; they’re a permission slip to imagine. Imagine care as adaptive, laughter as a companion to gravity, and intimacy as the place where history’s oddities become your private language.
