Wet Nurses under Scrutiny: Regulating Lactation in the Seventeenth-Century Casa Cuna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
abstract: Wet nursing was a central industry in the early modern period. Its widespread use can be seen throughout society, from royal and elite babies down to the lowest ranks, including orphans. Infant feeding and nutrition were a significant source of debate; before the advent of formula, breastmilk was the only option for young babies. Throughout the early modern period, humanists wrote about the benefits of mother's milk over that of a wet nurse. Sevillano humanist Luis Brochero echoes the preference for mother's milk and simultaneously demands reform for orphan care in his 1629 Discurso breve ( Brief Treatise ). His focus on this marginalized community is unique within the discourse of didactic texts about breastfeeding. In order to determine if any of the theoretical proposals endorsed by Brochero were implemented in practice, this article analyzes the seventeenth-century archival collection of Pagos a las amas ( Payments for Wet Nurses ) and the foundational Libro de los protocolos ( Book of Protocols ) from a foundling home, the Casa Cuna in Seville, Spain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".