Donkey milk in the Hippocratic Corpus: the treatise “Diseases II”

Background

Who, when, what kind of text

The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of around sixty Greek medical texts handed down under the name of the physician Hippocrates of Kos, but written by various, mostly unknown authors of the late 5th and 4th centuries BC. Scholars assign the treatise “Diseases II” (Latin De morbis II) to the so-called Cnidian tradition: it describes clinical pictures in brief succession and assigns a treatment scheme to each.

The basis of this medicine was humoral theory. Illness was seen as a disturbance in the balance of the body’s humours; the aim of many treatments was to “draw off” excess humours upwards or downwards. In this way of thinking, milk, whey and cereal juices were classified mainly according to their purging or nourishing effect.

The text used here follows the bilingual edition by Émile Littré (Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, vol. VII, Paris 1851), which is in the public domain and available online. Other texts of the Corpus also mention donkey milk, such as “Nature of Women” and “Regimen II” (ch. 41, where mare’s and donkey milk are classed as more strongly purging).

Content

What the source reports about donkey milk

In “Diseases II”, donkey milk (γάλα ὄνου or ὄνειον γάλα) appears in more than ten chapters. The pattern is almost always the same: first a medicine is given “downwards” (a purgative) or “upwards” (an emetic), after which the patient is to drink donkey milk or whey. The milk thus appears as part of the purging treatment, not as a remedy in its own right.

Several times the author ties its administration to conditions: in chapter 38 (a form of jaundice) and chapter 55, donkey milk is to be given only if the patient does not “suffer from the spleen”. If he does, the text in chapter 55 expressly advises against purging with cereal juices, milk or whey.

Chapter 70 describes a precise sequence: first whey, then donkey milk, followed by a period without solid food and only then light meals. In chapter 51, whey or donkey milk is followed by a phase with cow’s milk. The text thus deliberately distinguishes between types of milk.

The chapters deal with complaints that can hardly be identified with certainty by today’s understanding, such as forms of fever, jaundice or complaints of the head, chest and abdomen. The disease names of the time cannot simply be translated into modern diagnoses.