I thought no. Isaiah thought yes. And if he could type, he’d put that “yes” in italics and all caps.

From the moment my son was born, the one and only thing he asked of the world is that it give him something to suck. Isaiah sucked — poorly — on his thumbs and fingers and — expertly — on dirty laundry, stuffed sheep, our necks, other people’s noses. If we had put lumber in his bassinet, he would have sucked it down to driftwood.

Like all newborns, he was a body led around by a mouth. “Sucking is a predominant activity during the first 6 months of life,” as the infancy scientist Tiffany Field has written, “just as walking is the predominant milestone at 1 year.” It starts early: Ultrasounds frequently capture fetuses sucking on their extremities; babies are born tattooed with sucking blisters.

Sucking was what Isaiah was born to do. So why did I feel wracked about giving him a pacifier? He wasn’t wracked about taking it; he thought multicolored silicone was delightfully soothing. And it wasn’t just me who felt uncertain about it. Even Google’s algorithms knew we didn’t know what to make of pacifiers.

Strangely, our contemporary anxieties about pacifiers likely have less to do with the actual objects — recent research suggests they’re helpful, not harmful — than with their twisted modern history. We’ve inherited over a century of medical hysteria about infant sucking. No wonder pacifiers get us all worked up.

It’s a hysteria that was born in 1879, when a disturbing illustration of a “6 year old thumb pleasure-sucker with active assistance” appeared in a German medical journal. The illustration left no doubt what was meant by “active assistance.” The journal article — “The sucking of the fingers, lips, etc. by children (pleasure-sucking),” by S. Lindner, a German pediatrician — concluded without equivocation that infantile sucking was the cause of chronic masturbation. Lindner’s evidence was a study of 69 children who habitually sucked for comfort. As Lindner himself admitted, only four of those studied sucked with “the active assistance of the genitals,” but he took the small number to be proof of his hypothesis.

Unbelievably, this logic carried the day. Lindner’s article is the study that launched a thousand parental nightmares. It’s the ur-text of orality — it would inspire Freud several decades later — and by the turn of the century, Lindner’s conclusion was widely accepted: A medical treatise on childhood diseases could plainly state that “infants who persist in the habit of sucking always become masturbators.” Pacifiers were as problematic as fingers. “Remember that a baby that has a dummy is like a tiger that has tasted blood,” an English health pamphlet warned, using the British term for pacifier. A popular childcare book of the time described a typical pacifier user as “ricketty, pale, pasty, soft, wanting in bone and muscle, feeble, nervous, timid.” Taking away the pacifier was not enough. To prevent infants from sucking, parents were instructed to tie their children’s hands to their cribs, and if that didn’t work, to stuff them inside aluminum mittens.

Psychologists immediately drew a parallel between sucking, with its world-obliterating intensity, and drug addiction; indeed, many concluded that all addiction was sublimated sucking. In 1925, the American psychologist James Mursell went so far as to argue that “the drive behind the smoking habit cannot be due to the specific effects of tobacco as a drug, for these are negligible in any case.” The ultimate effects of alcohol and tobacco, he concluded, are “largely fictitious.” Sucking was the true menace.

It’s a fear that sounds at once far away and close by: Too much sucking is bad. For some reason. Really. Trust us.

Through the middle of the last century, the question of why infants sucked for no apparent reason — what’s known as non-nutritive sucking — would be a major disciplinary issue in psychology. The research into it was weird, colorful and occasionally bewildering. By the early 1940s, you could find a sentence like the following in a major scientific journal: “Although the writer has witnessed foot-sucking on numerous occasions in two young honey bears the present paper is devoted mainly to a record of thumb- and toe-sucking in the baboon.”