Milk (to increase in Nurses)

A note on the heading

Plain sense

A nursing mother’s milk, and making more of it. The “nurse” is the woman who suckles the child, her own or another’s: the wet nurse.

What the entries treat

Two claims. Fennel: “The leaves or seed, boiled in barley water and drank are good for nurses, to increase their milk, and make it more wholesome for the child”; Viper’s Bugloss: “The seed drank in wine, procures abundance of milk in women’s breasts”.

Where the word comes from

Nurse: Middle English norice, Old French norrice, Late Latin nūtrīcia, from Latin nūtrīx “wet nurse”, from nūtriō “to suckle”. The wet-nurse sense is archaic now.

Today’s words

low milk supply; lactation; breastfeeding; galactagogue (said of the plant) — the modern term names the same thing.

How it reads today

Reads as it did once “nurse” is read as the breastfeeding woman and not the hospital nurse. The complaint today is low milk supply; a substance said to bring on milk is, in the dictionary’s word, a galactagogue.

References

Wiktionary, s.v. “nurse” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Middle English norice, Old French norrice, Late Latin nūtrīcia, from Latin nūtrīcius, nūtrīx “wet nurse”, nūtriō “to suckle”; noun sense “(archaic) a wet nurse”. Wiktionary, s.v. “galactagogue” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Ancient Greek γάλακτος, genitive of γάλα “milk”, + ἀγωγός “guide”; “a substance that induces lactation”.

ThinkDeep333, 2026-10-28 · draft, not yet checked. Offered beside Culpeper’s heading, never in its place; nothing here says whether a plant works.