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It is worth mentioning that, as one would expect, he was fed at the breast.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a preponderance of birth-mothers had earlier begun to move away from breast-feeding their newborn babies. Early weaning became popularized by middle- and upper-class women who believed they were afflicted with “agalactia,” the medical term for an insufficient milk supply. In Vienna and other German-speaking urban centers, the employment of wet-nurses (i.e., motherly milk fountains, or “Mütterlichen Milch-brünnlein”) had long before been feasible in well-to-do homes.1 Often a lactating woman and her suckling child were engaged by a host family, which included their own unweaned infant so that all of them might sojourn at a fresh-air resort or spa during the summer months. Under such enhanced circumstances, a regular supply of breast milk became readily available for everyone concerned. The familial matriarch could readily monitor the hired wet-nurse's maternal behavior as well as her diet including the purity of domesticated animal milk she might imbibe. Pasteurization safeguards leading to the distribution of bottled “pediatric-milk formulae” did not become widespread until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Further complicating Amalia Freud's life as a novice parent, in particular, was that “she periodically suffered from tuberculosis, the great scourge of the nineteenth century” (Breger, 2009, p. 13). It is likewise noted that her younger brother had succumbed