Wet Nurse

A wet nurse is a woman who breastfeeds and cares for another woman's child, engaged when the mother has died, is unable to nurse the child herself, or chooses not to. Children who were wet-nursed may be called milk-siblings, and in some societies the families involved were bound by a recognized relationship of milk kinship. Wet-nursing was practiced in societies around the world until the invention of reliable formula milk in the twentieth century, and the practice has seen a small revival in the twenty-first century.