Just what events those lines were describing has been the subject of much speculation and, for the most part, has been ignored or interpreted allegorically. One reading suggests that Job’s breasts symbolize ponds, where cattle can drink.

A few hundred years later, during the 19th century, a time of scientific discovery and adventurous expeditions, allegorical readings of men breastfeeding gave way to more detailed accounts, albeit ones tinged with an unmistakable colonial exoticism.

In the summer of 1800, during a five-year expedition through Central and South America, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt passed through the small village of Arenas in what is today Venezuela. There, he was told the story of a local man who, after his wife had fallen ill, nursed his baby “two or three times a day for five months.” Humboldt got to meet the father later that year and examined his breasts, which were wrinkled, “like those of a woman who has suckled.”

By the end of the 19th century, the American physician George M. Gould and his colleague Walter L. Pyle listed, in their book “Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,” a number of instances of men suckling infants, including an unverifiable report, relayed by 16th-century missionaries in Brazil, claiming “there was a whole Indian nation whose women had small and withered breasts, and whose children owed their nourishment entirely from the males.”

Only once do we get a sense of how others reacted to these events. The naturalist John Richardson, while on an expedition through northern Canada in the early 19th century, wrote of a Chipewyan father who nursed his child after his spouse died. He was viewed as “partaking of the duties of women” by other Chipewyan, who saw it as “degrading.”

What Richardson thought of the matter we don’t know. Nor do we have any additional sources to help determine that any of these events actually happened as recorded, or whether cultural misunderstandings or biases may have warped the accounts.

In the 1930s, the search for an answer to whether men could breastfeed moved from expeditions to the laboratory. Although Charles Darwin had observed that there were instances when men could yield “a copious supply of milk,” it was not until the discovery and naming of the milk-producing hormone prolactin in 1933 that scientists could really begin to examine the lactating ability of male mammals. Experiments were performed on rats, monkeys and, in some cases, humans. And they worked. In a study in 1954, three men with cancer who had been on estrogen treatment were injected with large doses of luteotrophin, a form of prolactin. One of them, age 64, lactated on the sixth day of the treatment. He didn’t stop for seven years.