The fuller story
The Talmud tells it in a few lines. A man’s wife died and left him with a son still at the breast, and he didn’t have the money to pay a wet nurse. Then “a miracle was performed on his behalf, and he developed breasts like the two breasts of a woman,” and he nursed the child himself. The sages couldn’t agree on what it meant. Rav Yosef: “Come and see how great this person is that a miracle of that magnitude was performed on his behalf.” Abaye: “On the contrary, how dishonorable is this person that the order of creation was altered on his behalf.”
Humboldt’s case needs no miracle. Traveling through the missions of New Andalusia in 1799, he heard of Francisco Lozano of Arenas: when the baby’s mother fell sick, Lozano, then thirty-two, took the infant into his bed and held it to his chest to quiet it. The suckling brought in milk, “thick and very sweet,” and he nursed his son two or three times a day for five months, with no other food. Humboldt saw the certificate drawn up at the time. When Lozano came to meet the travelers at Cumaná, his son was thirteen or fourteen, and Humboldt’s companion Aimé Bonpland found the father’s breasts “wrinkled like those of a woman who has given suck.”
Today, milk in men is rare, and when it appears unexpectedly it’s usually a sign of a hormone imbalance worth seeing a doctor about.
Why it matters
The sages argued about whether the father was blessed or humbled. Either way, the story has been told for centuries, and the book’s own line is the reason: it shows how deep the instinct to nurture runs.
Humboldt’s laborer makes it concrete. Faced with a hungry child, a body did what bodies have always tried to do. That’s the ground every nursing relationship stands on.
