Samuel Ferris
London: John Abraham, [1785].

In which an attempt is made to ascertain its natural use; to investigate experimentally its general nature and properties; and to explain its effects in the cure of various diseases: Likewise to point out the varieties in the food of the animal, from which it is taken; and the circumstances in the mode of life and conduct of those women, who afford it, which more especially tend to change its appearance, and to impair its salutary qualities: and particularly to enforce the cautions and restrictions, which are necessary to be observed by those, whose duty or business it is to suckle an infant race. One of the more substantial English-language eighteenth-century monographs devoted wholly to milk, combining experimental chemistry with medical, moral, and social thought on infant feeding, motherhood, female bodies, and the transmission of health and character. Ferris undertakes comparative chemical experiments on six milks (ass, human, mare, cow, goat, and ewe) and uses the results to advance a sustained argument for maternal breastfeeding against both wet-nursing and the nursery customs of the day. He maintains that a mother’s own milk is the best possible nutriment and casts a woman’s refusal to nurse her child as ‘one of the worst species of inhumanity’. He approvingly cites the late Dr William Hunter (1718-1783), who believed cancers of the breast occurred disproportionately among women who declined to breastfeed, and condemns the common practice of withholding the breast during the first days after birth. Where maternal nursing proves impossible, Ferris subjects the wet nurse to detailed scrutiny. Her diet, habits, mode of life, and even emotional state are made objects of prescription, the infant being thought to absorb the consequences of her conduct through her milk. The nursing body is thus framed throughout as an object of medical and social management, ordered in the interests of the ‘infant race’. Presentation copy, inscribed by Ferris to The Revd. Mr Tonyn, likely the Revd Charles William Tonyn (1732-1805), Rector of Radnage, Buckinghamshire, a parish situated near Great Missenden, where Ferris settled in 1785.