References to male breastfeeding date back several centuries: the physician Bartholin in the 1600s and the explorer and naturalist von Humboldt in the 1800s both reported cases of men breastfeeding their children; it is also mentioned in an edict proclaimed by the Chinese emperor K'ang Hsi in 1728, and in the Talmud.
More recently, the cases have become known of a transgender parent (born male, later transitioned to female) who, after years of hormone therapy, managed to breastfeed for three and a half months the child born to another woman (who did not want to breastfeed even though she could have), and of another father who was able to do so thanks to an ingenious technique connecting a syringe full of milk to a silicone nipple placed over his own.
In the animal world, cases of male goats nursing their young were already mentioned by Aristotle; among the Columbidae, a non-mammalian family that includes about 300 species of birds (including pigeons and doves), the male and female take turns feeding their chicks with a kind of milk secreted by the lining of the crop.
But it is above all in folk tradition that numerous legends related to male breastfeeding can be found.
They can be grouped into two different categories: those about a saint (or a holy man) who, through divine intercession, manages to breastfeed a newborn; and those in which the appearance of milk in a man's chest is instead a punishment for wrongdoing. Indeed, there are tales of a kind of poetic justice in which milk began flowing from the nipples of men who had doubted the truth of the stories about breastfeeding saints, or who had mocked the women who believed them.
The best known of the legends in the first group is that of Saint Mamas (also called Mammano), who «having come across an abandoned newborn by chance, took him in his arms and began to rock him to stop him crying. But the little one was hungry! The saint prayed to the Lord for help: suddenly his chest swelled, and abundant milk flowed from his breasts».
In Belluno there is a shrine dedicated to Saint Mamas, located near a spring that, according to legend, the saint miraculously caused to flow. Its water was said to be able to restore milk to women who had lost it. Even today many breastfeeding mothers visit this place carrying brooms to clean the saint's church and receive in return the grace of being able to breastfeed again. The saint's beneficial influence, as the patron of breastfeeding, was also said to extend to the milk of animals.
Legends similar to that of Saint Mamas can be found in very different cultural areas. In Turkey, the ability to breastfeed is attributed to the founder of the Islamic monastic order of the Mawlawiyya, the well-known «whirling dervishes», who perform dances meant to induce dizziness in order to lower the level of consciousness and reach ecstasy.
In Irish folklore, there is a tale of Saint Findchua, whose milk was said to be more nourishing than that of 10 women combined! In Icelandic folklore, the appearance of milk in a man occurred after the death of the newborn's mother and introduced an element absent from the other tales: the transformation of blood into milk in the man, who would pierce his nipples to make nourishment flow for the child.
See «Latte di padre» («A Father's Milk»), R. Lionetti, 1984.