Thirty years after Elizabeth Drinker gave birth to her last child, another mother of eight published anonymously the first American book to deal exclusively with the raising of children: The Maternal Physician (1811). The author, Mary Palmer Tyler, sounding like a latter-day Cotton Mather, approached the question of maternal nursing in light of its moral value. Joining the chorus of those singing its praises, she urged mothers to “undergo every thing short of death or lasting disease” to nurse their babies. Still, like the medical authorities she cited, Tyler advised employing a wet nurse temporarily if the mother was unable to satisfy the hunger of her newborn or permanently if the mother could not nurse at all. Little had changed in the rhetoric of infant feeding or the rationale for employing wet nurses. The reality, however, was different.

Motherhood, as the discussions of Tyler and her contemporaries suggest, was being recontoured in the postrevolutionary era. The moral weight placed on maternal nursing grew heavier as women assumed even greater responsibility for child rearing and as child rearing was given greater emphasis in republican America. Overwhelming women's search for child-rearing advice was a flood of domestic treatises and popular medical guidebooks, all dealing with infant nurture. In this literature, the wet nurse appears in a new guise. As she crossed the threshold of her employer's home, bringing with her the taint of her environment and her flawed character, the wet nurse became a potential threat as well as a possible savior.

No one described the moral economy of wet nursing more eloquently than the Irish-born, British writer George Moore. In his 1894 novel Esther Waters, the heroine confronts a selfish employer who has denied her permission to visit her sick child and rages:

Moore's heroine, Esther Waters, articulated what physicians had long admitted – that wet nursing often involved trading the life of a poor baby for that of a rich one. Or, as one physician depicted it, “by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved.” Luther Emmett Holt, the preeminent pediatrician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concurred. “Employment of wet-nurses tends, on the whole,” he wrote, “to increase infant mortality rather than reduce it, owing to the excessively high mortality rate of the wet-nurses' infants.”

The medical literature makes clear that doctors wrestled with the moral dimensions of wet nursing and, in some cases, tried to mitigate its impact.

The steady decline of wet nursing that began in the nineteenth century concluded in the twentieth century with the transformation of human milk into a commodity. In 1900 wet nurses occupied several small niches – suckling foundlings in institutions or working for well-to-do private families. By the 1910s and 1920s the number of wet nurses in these venues had decreased, although new opportunities arose for women willing to suckle abandoned babies in their homes or premature infants in hospitals. At the same time, a new career opened for lactating mothers: expressing and selling their breast milk for use in homes and hospitals. This procedure proved so successful that by the 1930s wet nurses had almost entirely vanished, replaced by bottled human milk. As one physician described it, human milk had become “therapeutic merchandise.”

In the case of human milk, commodification – the process by which things come to have economic value – was configured by the long history of wet nursing. Not surprisingly, traditional ideas about milk and character uncoupled slowly. The personal characteristics of wet nurses – their health, morals, willingness to obey authority, emotional ties to their own children – had long been crucial measures of their worth. So too were women who sold their milk judged by more than just the product that they made. In the end, however, commodification transformed the meaning of breast milk.

The task of locating healthy wet nurses remained a difficult one for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physicians, despite the development of institutions housing large numbers of new mothers. New York pediatrician Louis Fischer complained in his 1901 textbook, Infant-Feeding: In its Relation to Health and Disease, that there was no easy means for finding acceptable candidates. “As no licensed agencies, exist,” he wrote, “a few people having so-called influences procure wet-nurses by friendship, or something similar, from superintendents and house physicians where obstetrical work is done.” The procurers bedeviled Fischer by sometimes referring women with only “colostrum-milk” or, in one case, offering a seventeen-year-old who had given birth prematurely, “evidently an abortion,” and whose milk was “thin water.” Just as a previous generation had found itself at the mercy of the proprietors of intelligence offices and maternity home operators, early twentieth-century physicians believed themselves to be preyed upon by a new kind of entrepreneur, succinctly labeled by Fischer as “people who traffic in wet-nurses for a fee.”

Although Fischer's observations regarding the lack of a reliable system echo those of an earlier generation of physicians, his specific allegations suggest that doctors had more resources at hand than in previous decades. The “traffickers” Fischer wrote of mediated between hospital-based physicians and physicians who worked for private families. Their niche was made possible by the rise of obstetric facilities serving poor women, the development of hospital internships, and the growing expectation that physicians, not individual families, would inspect and hire wet nurses.

Bottled breast milk remains to this day a vital product for a small number of infants. However, it is collected and distributed far differently than it was early in the twentieth century. It is no longer a commodity sold by working-class women, but has become, instead, a gift. And it is given not in the expectation of reciprocity, but as part of a “moral transaction” encompassing late twentieth-century perceptions of infancy, mothering, economy, and society. The idea that an infant might die because its family lacks the means to purchase breast milk has become morally repugnant, just as has the notion that a woman might earn a living by selling her milk.

The transformed meaning of breast milk production is illustrated by an article in the December 1982 Boston Globe describing the meeting between Lacie Lynette Smith of Oklahoma and the women whose milk had kept her alive. Born with a rare allergic condition, Lacie could ingest nothing but breast milk. Her mother, unable to feed her because she was on medication, drained “every milk bank we could find.” On the verge of running out of milk, she contacted the milk bank of Worcester, Massachusetts – one of thirty operating milk banks in the United States, and one with 275 donors. The Worcester milk bank started sending Lacie the milk she needed, and at the age of nineteen months Lacie traveled to New England to meet her unseen benefactors.

In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), Margaret Mead recalled the impending birth of her first child. Clearly influenced by her field work in regions where neither bottles nor formulas were available, the eminent anthropologist wrote of how she promised herself that she would hire a wet nurse if she could not breast-feed her child.

Mead would have been hard pressed to hire a wet nurse in 1939, the year of her daughter's birth. Although hospitals sometimes kept women on call to provide breast milk to premature infants, wet nursing as a form of domestic service was fast becoming extinct. Women who could not or would not breast-feed their babies typically provided them with an artificial formula composed of modified cow's milk. Indeed, by the middle of the twentieth century, many American families routinely chose bottle-feeding over breast-feeding, perceiving the former to be the modern, scientific way to rear children. Mead thus was far out of step with her contemporaries. Her field work in less developed regions had taught her something most Americans preferred to forget: that human infants are most likely to survive and flourish when fed human milk.

There are only three ways to nourish an infant: with its own mother's milk, with an artificial food, or with the milk of a woman who is not its mother – a wet nurse. An obvious question is why Americans rejected wet nursing, assuming that what “science” produced was superior to what “nature” provided.

The decline of wet nursing in the late nineteenth century reflected advances in artificial feeding, shifting cultural beliefs regarding motherhood, and new employment opportunities for women previously hired as wet nurses. Artificial feeding became the first choice of many middle-class women, as Rima Apple has explained, not only because it was easier, safer, and cheaper than wet nursing but also because it was promoted and used in the context of the maternal ideology known as scientific motherhood.

As America industrialized, child rearing became a home industry for middle-class women. Even as the percentage of single women who participated in the labor force soared and the number of women professionals expanded in occupations such as teaching and nursing, motherhood continued to be judged women's most vital career. The cultural significance of motherhood gained strength from women's collective action. Female reform organizations stressed improving society to make a better world for children – an ideology that historians would call “domestic feminism.” The Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and one of the most visible and successful women's organizations of the nineteenth century, used the slogan “home protection” in its battle against the evils of alcohol. Other women's groups sailed in the same direction: making better children and better homes their collective destination. Among the largest organizations with this goal were the General Federation of Women's Clubs, an umbrella group organized in 1890, whose numerous constituent members engaged in programs of domestic welfare, and the National Congress of Mothers, which was founded in 1897 to support the education of mothers and to expand the relationship between the child and the state.

In 1881, physician Jerome Walker published a novel entitled The First Baby: His Trials and the Trials of His Parents, an account of one family's experiences in rearing a young infant. The book, an extended didactic discussion of a popular subject, was thinly disguised as fiction so that it could compete in a market crammed with advice literature. In one segment, the hero, Robert Matthews, accompanied by the faithful family physician, Dr. Lyons, undertakes an extensive journey in search of a wet nurse. The trip is only moderately successful, leading Lyons to lament the absence of a “systematic effort to furnish the persons most needing wet nurses with just the right kind of woman.”

Walker's novel accurately delineates the complexity of the urban wet nurse marketplace, in which public facilities, private entrepreneurs, and benevolent organizations vied to supply families with wet nurses. At the core of the expanding layers of wet nurse suppliers was a wet nurse labor force increasingly composed of poor, single mothers. These were not the “right kind of women” referred to by Dr. Lyons. However, as the novel's characters and real-life families recognized, the wet nurse population was shaped not by the demands of employers and the preferences of physicians, but by the conditions of life and labor for urban, working-class women.

The evolution of the marketplace between 1830 and 1900 reflected three separate, simultaneous trends, beginning with the commercialization of domestic service.

Women who refuse to suckle their infants are “dead while they live,” wrote Cotton Mather in 1710. The celebrated Puritan minister's sentiments fore-shadowed generations of “family advisers,” who praised mothers for breast-feeding and excoriated those who hired wet nurses. Yet social observers, including Mather, understood that families sometimes needed wet nurses – women who played a vital, indeed life-giving, role in the nursery. Mather himself retained a wet nurse for at least one of his fifteen children, and he kept his own former wet nurse on his charity list.

The breach between cultural prescription and biological need marked Mather's writings as well as his life. In the former, he articulated both the religious objections to wet nurses and the practical reasons for using them. Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement (1710), written to “Prepare a Pious Woman for Her Lying In,” instructed mothers to suckle their own infants when possible and chided those who refused to do so: “be not such an ostrich as to decline it.” However, for those who tried and failed he had words of solace: “entertain it with submission to the will of God.” More pragmatic advice appeared in The Angel of Bethesda (1722), in which Mather summarized his knowledge of medicine, including the treatment of common illnesses and the promotion of health. In this volume, Mather suggested ways to increase the milk of either a wet nurse or a mother through the use of drugs and diet.

In the fall of 1930 the Zurich mathematician Hermann Weyl returned to Göttingen as successor to David Hilbert. Soon thereafter he gave a speech in which he tried to explain to Göttingen students and rationalize to himself why he had chosen to come back to Germany after seventeen years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or ETH), where he had been content and productive. Weyl said:

Weyl not only wanted to get students to escape from the relative isolation of Zurich and to return to German culture, he also had to live up to his responsibilities as a member of the Göttingen thought collective and the elite of German science and try to wear Hilbert's mantle in a manner worthy of its previous owner. That he was expected to do so can be inferred from a letter in which Arnold Sommerfeld, one of the elder statesmen of theoretical physics in Germany, congratulated him on the appointment: “I am very pleased that you have decided to go to Göttingen. The opposite would have been a great disappointment to Hilbert.”

It is well known that most of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle emigrated to America in the 1930s or 1940s, and there became academically prominent and intellectually influential. The general trend of American sociology between 1930 and 1960 is typically seen as positivistic, and it is common to connect these two points and to suggest that developments in sociology were influenced or caused by the migration of the Vienna Circle and the dominance of their ideas. The nature of the proposed connection varies, and some scholars, such as Christopher G.A. Bryant, see the influence as only minor. These ideas, however, are not normally grounded in any systematic, detailed research of the actual connections and influence of empirical sociology. This chapter aims, in contrast, to look more closely at what actually happened. In doing so, it will inevitably raise some general methodological questions with regard to tracing influence.

Who should be counted as a member of the Vienna Circle? Some scholars have included thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, who were in Vienna at the same time and who had contacts with members of the Circle, although they were not actually members. We have excluded them from this study. Another potential group is those who were never based in Vienna but who kept in close touch with the Circle and regarded themselves as part of the same movement. The people around Hans Reichenbach and the Society for Scientific Philosophy in Berlin, for example, make one such group, and pragmatically will be counted as belonging to the Circle. Reports indicate, however, that Felix Kaufmann, who attended meetings of the Circle, did not regard himself as a member because his intellectual position differed, and thus he will be treated as marginal.

INTRODUCTION

As indicated by the title of this book, “Forced Migration and Scientific Change,” I shall not discuss the normal case of scientific change - what the internal view would refer to as “cognitive progress” - but scientific change at the social as well as institutional levels. The discussion focuses on three aspects. First, I will concentrate on the forms of scientific systems that existed in the different German-speaking countries before their governments drove many scientists into exile; in this case, the analysis will look at the changes that science and scientific systems underwent in the wake of this “output” of émigrés, and thus assess the situation in terms of social and/or cognitive “losses.” A second approach will focus on the cohort of émigrés and investigate the changes that individuals, scientific schools, or - if evidence for this can be furnished - whole disciplines underwent during the process of emigration. Generally, the level of aggregation of such an analysis will be relatively low - that is, close to the individual. A third course - practically inverse to the first approach - will focus on the changes disciplines and scientific systems experienced in those countries that assimilated larger numbers of émigrés. An analysis of the “input” will be conducted under the heading of “gains.”

Of all the academic disciplines, pedagogy is the one least familiar to emigration researchers in Germany and elsewhere. Although studies and discussions devoted to education specialists working on a practical level are by no means unknown, the subject has gained neither widespread currency nor a reputation as a scholarly discipline. Despite the lack of such a reputation - even to this day - pedagogy in Germany has grown continuously and taken on a much more prominent role over the course of the twentieth century. Historically, the teaching of pedagogy as a theoretical subject began outside the universities in teacher training seminars in the early nineteenth century, and from there spread to colleges of education and similar institutions in the twentieth century. Since the period 1900 to 1920, it has been taught in an applied form at specialized institutions of higher education or Fachhochschulen - for example, in the training of social workers and vocational teachers.

With its development, pedagogy has contributed significantly to the German academic and professional scene as the basis for a large number of teaching and educational professions and as a discipline in its own right. Therefore, when studying the emigration of German scientists and scholars, we ignore pedagogy at our own peril. By looking at it, we can show the impact of emigration in a specific case - namely, on a discipline that had not yet gained a firm academic footing by 1933. Beyond this specific case, we can also observe the consequences of emigration for the social sciences and the humanities more generally.