The sexually transmitted diseases we have now are in addition to the ones we had a century ago. Syphilis is no longer the horror that it was because of antibiotics that were first used sixty years ago, although the problem of resistance means that it may regain its status as a sexual scourge. What it will never again regain is its danger of being transmitted from infants to their wet nurses. That this was a problem was mentioned in a medical text of 1498, shortly after the disease first showed up in Europe. An infected baby suckling at a nurse's nipple could easily transmit the disease. That this was an enormous problem, now nearly completely forgotten, is made clear in _Amalia's Tale: A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice_ (Houghton Mifflin) by historian David I. Kertzer. It is also a story of a legal battle with the peasant heroine facing off against the medical establishment, helped by a crusading attorney. It is thus a surprisingly engaging legal drama, pieced together from century-old archives and fleshed out with a flare for storytelling. Kertzer may be an academic (he is provost of Brown University and a professor of anthropology and Italian studies), but he has deliberately omitted footnotes, and as in his _The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara_, he has told a gripping story of a time, land, science, and social conditions very different from our own.

Bologna's foundling home was a charitable institution run by the rich and powerful, like its president Count Francesco Isolani. There was no way to feed the infants deposited in the foundling home except by hiring wet nurses. The wet nurse economy took infants from the foundling home itself and placed them in rural areas, with a stipend to the nurse that was a welcome supplement for those trying to get by on the land. The women might continue to get paid for raising the children as they grew older. One of these women was Amalia Bagnacavalli, who lived in the little hamlet of Oreglia twenty miles from Bologna. In 1890, she was 23 years old. She was married, and her one-year-old daughter was no longer nursing. She got a sickly baby from the foundling home, and eventually returned it, but contracted syphilis from the short time spent nursing. Kertzer demonstrates that a medical malpractice suit could not have been contemplated before the political upheaval Italy was undergoing, with leftist reforms and championing of the lower classes. Such movements were boosted by people like the young lawyer Augusto Barbieri who saw as his mission the protection of the poor and the institution of a more scientific government. Most of _Amalia's Tale_ has to do with the tangled path of the case through the courts, with expert testimony, shifty tactics on both sides, appeals, counter-appeals, and more. It was legally a victory for Amalia, but if you remember the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in _Bleak House_, the outcome was of as little monetary benefit. Eventually social changes, pasteurization, and the development of a reliable infant formula in the 1920s would completely seal the events described here into history.

It is still significant history, in Kertzer's hands, even though the episodes here are long gone and little-remembered. There are many modern parallels, however, and the phrase "medical malpractice suit" is quite familiar to us all, as are the legal shenanigans on display here, as is the spectacle of dueling medical experts and physicians affronted by any questioning of their judgement. Amalia's tale is a sad one of a muted victory. As Kertzer writes at the end of the book, "... back then, as today, when the world of the rich collides with that of the poor, it is rarely the rich who suffer."