Celsus, “De medicina”: donkey milk in a Roman medical handbook

Background

Who, when, what kind of text

“De medicina” is the only surviving part of a larger encyclopaedia in which Celsus also covered agriculture, warfare and rhetoric. Its eight books were written in the early 1st century AD and are regarded as one of the most important Latin accounts of Greek-influenced medicine. Whether Celsus was a practising physician or an educated layman is still debated among scholars.

The work was little known in the Middle Ages and was rediscovered only in the 15th century; the first printed edition appeared in Florence in 1478. We quote the Latin text of the Loeb edition by W. G. Spencer, which the LacusCurtius website makes freely available with the page numbers of the edition. Chapter numbering follows the division in common use today.

Content

What the source reports about donkey milk

The most detailed passage is in Book II, in the chapter on purging. Celsus reports that “the ancients” purged in almost every disease, among other things with milk from the ass, the cow or the goat. The milk was boiled with a little salt, the curd removed and the whey-like liquid drunk. Immediately afterwards Celsus remarks that such remedies mostly harm the stomach.

In Book IV, on joint complaints, he mentions people who, after purging themselves with donkey milk, were permanently spared from gout. In Book V, among the antidotes, he names for henbane, besides hot honey-wine, “any milk, but above all ass’s milk”.

It is striking that Celsus does not describe donkey milk as a food but, in the logic of humoral medicine, as a means of purging and diluting. He presents the gout passage as an individual report (“some”), not as a rule.