Before breast pumps, women relied on a surprisingly wide range of solutions to feed their babies, manage milk supply, and deal with common breastfeeding problems. Wet nursing, hand expression, cross-nursing among neighbors, animal milk, and simple feeding vessels all played roles at different times and in different cultures. Some of these practices date back thousands of years, and many persisted well into the 20th century.
Wet Nursing Was the Primary Alternative
For most of recorded history, the main solution when a mother couldn’t breastfeed was to find another woman who could. Wet nursing dates back to at least 3000 BC in Western history, first documented in Ancient Egypt. Royal infants in Pharaonic Egypt had several wet nurses, selected from the families of senior palace officials. These women held high social status.
In ancient Rome and Greece, wet nursing was common among the wealthy. Romans could go to a specific marketplace, the Forum Olitorium, to find and hire a wet nurse with the physical and behavioral traits they preferred. Slave owners also used wet nurses to cheaply raise the children of enslaved women, keeping mothers available for labor.
By the 16th and 17th centuries, wet nursing had become deeply tied to class. Upper-class European women frequently refused to breastfeed, partly because it was considered unfashionable and partly over concerns about their figures. The scale of this practice was enormous: French government records from 1780 show that only about 1,000 of 21,000 babies born in Paris that year were nursed by their own mothers. For poor women, becoming a wet nurse was a well-organized and well-paid profession, one of the few reliable sources of income available to them.
During the Industrial Revolution, the economics shifted. Lower wages and rising costs pushed more working-class women to seek employment outside the home, and wet nursing became more common among the poor rather than just the rich. Urban families sometimes sent their infants to rural wet nurses, which had the secondary effect of moving babies away from disease-ridden cities.
Cross-Nursing Among Friends and Neighbors
Alongside the formal economy of hired wet nurses, a quieter tradition existed: mothers simply feeding each other’s babies. This informal cross-nursing balanced out differences in milk supply between women in a community. A mother producing more than her baby needed could nurse a neighbor’s child, and the favor would be returned when circumstances changed.
This created meaningful social bonds. In many Muslim and Christian communities, children nursed by the same woman became “milk siblings,” a relationship taken seriously enough to affect marriage rules and social obligations. In Ottoman-era Thessaloniki, wealthy Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian wet nurses, and the children of those households often became milk-brothers, relationships that lasted for years. In the Hindu Kush region of Chitral, milk-kinship could even allow a family to move between social castes. If a woman nursed a child from a higher class, she and her own children gained membership in that class.
Feeding Babies Without Breast Milk
When no nursing woman was available, caregivers turned to animal milk and grain-based mixtures. Archaeological evidence shows this practice is ancient: clay feeding vessels with nipple-shaped spouts have been found in the graves of newborn infants dating to 2000 BC. Chemical analysis of residues inside these vessels confirmed they held dairy products from domesticated animals.
The most common substitute food was called “pap,” a mixture of bread soaked in water or milk. A nurse would often chew the bread first to get the right consistency before feeding it to the baby. Wealthier families could afford to add butter, milk, or sugar. Other recipes included cornmeal, crushed walnuts, fennel seeds, and sometimes wine. Caregivers fed pap to infants using small open vessels called pap boats, typically made of porcelain, earthenware, or silver, shaped to pour liquid slowly into a baby’s mouth.
Another device, the “bubby pot,” resembled a small ceramic teapot. Caregivers tied cloth over the spout to act as a crude nipple and to strain the milk. These were used widely across Europe. Medical writers of the time also recommended donkey milk as the closest nutritional substitute for human milk at any age. Thomas Muffett wrote about this in 1584, and the idea persisted for centuries.
These alternatives carried serious risks. Infant mortality was high among babies fed animal milk and pap, partly because the food itself was nutritionally inadequate and partly because sanitation was poor. The presence of feeding vessels in infant graves is itself telling.
Managing Engorgement and Breast Problems
Without a pump, women who experienced painful engorgement, cracked nipples, or mastitis had to rely on hands-on techniques and home remedies. Hand expression, the technique of manually squeezing milk from the breast, has been practiced for as long as breastfeeding has existed. Midwives taught new mothers to soften engorged breasts by expressing just enough milk to relieve pressure and allow the baby to latch.
A technique still recommended today, reverse pressure softening, involves using gentle pressure around the base of the nipple to push swelling back into the breast tissue, creating enough softness for a baby to attach. Breast massage in various forms has been used across cultures, from the Oketani method in Japan to Gua-Sha therapy in China.
Home remedies varied by region. Cabbage leaves applied to the breasts were a common European treatment for engorgement and remain in use today, though evidence for their effectiveness is limited. In Japan, grated potatoes served the same purpose. Hollyhock compresses, hot and cold packs, and various herbal preparations were all part of the toolkit. The underlying approach was consistent: warm compresses before nursing to encourage milk flow, cold compresses afterward to reduce swelling.
Early Suction Devices Before Modern Pumps
The forerunner of the breast pump was a device called a “sucking glass,” first described in published texts in 1577. It was a simple glass vessel with a bulbous end that fit over the nipple and a long pipe stem. A woman would place the bulb over her breast and create suction by sucking on the stem, or she could fill the bulb with hot water, empty it, and place the heated glass over the nipple so that a vacuum formed as the glass cooled.
Sucking glasses weren’t primarily designed to collect milk for later feeding. Their main purpose was drawing out inverted nipples, a problem that became more common as tightly laced corsets compressed women’s chests. They were also used when nursing was too painful due to cracking or infection. The basic design changed very little for roughly 300 years.
The first patented mechanical breast pump came in 1854, when Orwell H. Needham received U.S. Patent No. 11,135. His design was a genuine leap forward. It used a bellows-style air pump connected to a flexible rubber cup by a tube, so the pumping motion wouldn’t jostle the breast. The rubber shield was soft and elastic, designed to collapse around the nipple in a way that mimicked the pressure of a nursing baby’s mouth. Needham specifically noted that a mother could operate it herself and control the suction. By the late 19th century, syringe-style pumps and “bicycle horn” hand pumps had appeared, eventually leading to the electric models that became widespread in the 20th century.
Why These Practices Faded
Wet nursing declined sharply in the 19th century as artificial feeding became more viable. The development of rubber nipples, sterilization techniques, and eventually commercial infant formula gave mothers alternatives that didn’t require another woman’s body. Pasteurization made animal milk safer. Refrigeration made storage possible. Each of these advances chipped away at a system that had sustained human infants for millennia.
The shift wasn’t entirely positive. Early formula and animal milk substitutes still carried risks, and the loss of community breastfeeding networks meant mothers had fewer support systems. But the breast pump, once it became reliable and affordable, gave women something genuinely new: the ability to provide their own milk to their baby without being physically present for every feeding. That had never really been possible before at any meaningful scale, and it reshaped how mothers navigated work, illness, and daily life.