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  • Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900
  • Michelle K. Rhoades
Joan Sherwood. Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. xiii + 214 pp. Ill. $75.00 (ISBN-10: 0773537414, ISBN-13: 978-0-7735-3741-5).

In her new book, Joan Sherwood examines work at Paris’s Vaugirard hospital to treat infants with congenital syphilis. The experiments, conducted from 1780 to 1790, entailed giving mercury to wet nurses in hopes that mercury laced breast milk would effectively treat syphilitic infants. While the efforts of doctors at Vaugirard were short-lived, Sherwood argues that the idea of using mercurialized breast milk as a treatment would last well into the nineteenth century and deeply influence French medicine and law.

The Vaugirard experiments included administering mercury to syphilitic women who then nursed both their own and an abandoned syphilitic infant. In their treatment plan, doctors wanted nurses to “pass on the medication in a milder form” so that the infant could tolerate it (p. 8). Doctors had long recognized that mercury remained too strong for the delicate system of a newborn to tolerate. Ultimately, researchers hoped that they would develop a cure for congenital syphilis (p. 23). However, doctors saw little improvement in infants’ conditions, sometimes adding stronger mercury treatments through ointments or vapors (p. 49). Certainly this worsened the infants’ conditions, but Sherwood reminds her readers that “the prospects for these infants were not good under any circumstances” (p. 73).

In the second part of her book Sherwood turns to a discussion of the doctor– patient relationship and the reactions of healthy wet nurses who contracted syphilis from their nurslings (p. 127). Families and doctors, desperate to find nurses for a syphilitic infant, avoided telling healthy women about the disease. When these women fell ill, they brought civil cases against the families and their doctors. Sherwood argues that due to their demands for redress, “nineteenth-century wet nurses in France must be credited for bringing about a revision in French jurisprudence” (p. 142). As a result of the nurses’ legal challenges a Dijon court asserted in 1868 that doctors remained obligated to protect the health of the wet nurse as well as that of the child. Until then, family doctors considered the infant alone to be their patient. Their loyalties lay with the interests of the infant and the child’s family (pp. 143–44). The 1868 decision gave nurses more authority in the French courts and put pressure on doctors to be more forthcoming. However, Sherwood explains that the decision did not make things easier. In addition to showing that they contracted syphilis from their nurslings, wet nurses also had to prove that one or the other of the parents had syphilis. This, she says, complicated matters immensely because “the burden of proof was on the wet nurse” (p. 145).

Even though the burden of proof lay with nurses, doctors felt beset by the new situation. Prominent doctors wrote about the new legal environment “outlining measures by which ‘the doctor could guard himself’” from poor medical choices or compromising legal situations (p. 147). Sherwood argues that the medical profession in France changed as a reaction to the Dijon ruling. Doctors, she says, “managed and manipulated the legal, scientific, and professional aspects of a [End Page 656] volatile situation,” largely to protect themselves (p. 148). Advice for doctors included informing the nurse (in Latin) about the infant’s syphilis, allowing a family member to persuade her (by whatever means) to take the infant, or encouraging her to pay for her own doctor (p. 149). Sherwood points out that this type of advice did very little to protect the health of the nurse or offer her care. Instead, it simply protected doctors from persecution and the good name of the profession.

Medical historians will appreciate Sherwood’s institutional history of Vaugirard as a modern hospital and her detailed analysis of the reliance on mercury to treat syphilis. Legal historians and historians of gender and women’s history may wish for more in Sherwood’s analysis of women’s authority and their use of...

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