Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, BOOK XXVIII. REMEDIES DERIVED FROM LIVING CREATURES., CHAP. 21.

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CHAP. 21.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOMAN'S MILK.

As to the uses to which woman's milk has been applied, it is generally agreed that it is the sweetest and the most delicate of all, and that it is the best¹ of remedies for chronic fevers and cœliac affections, when the woman has just weaned her infant more particularly. In cases, too, of sickness at stomach, fevers, and gnawing sensations, it has been found by experience to be highly beneficial; as also, in combination with frankincense, for abscesses of the mamillæ. When the eyes are bloodshot from the effects of a blow, or affected with pain or defluxion, it is a very good plan to inject woman's milk into them, more particularly in combination with honey and juice of daffodil, or else powdered frankincense. In all cases, however, the milk of a woman who has been delivered of a male child is the most efficacious, and still more so if she has had male twins; provided always she abstains from wine and food of an acrid nature. Mixed with the white of an egg in a liquid state, and applied to the forehead in wool, it arrests defluxions of the eyes. If a frog² has spirted its secretions³ into the eye, woman's milk is a most excellent remedy; and for the bite of that reptile it is used both internally and externally.

It is asserted that if a person is rubbed at the same moment with the milk of both mother and daughter, he will be proof for the rest of his life against all affections of the eyes. Mixed with a small quantity of oil, woman's milk is a cure for diseases of the ears; and if they are in pain from the effects of a blow, it is applied warm with goose-grease. If the ears emit an offensive smell, a thing that is mostly the case in diseases of long standing, wool is introduced into those organs, steeped in woman's milk and honey. While symptoms of jaundice are still visible in the eyes, woman's milk is injected, in combination with elaterium.⁴ Taken as a drink, it is productive of singularly good effects, where the poison of the sea-hare, the buprestis,⁵ or, as Aristotle tells us, the plant dorycnium⁶ has been administered; as a preventive also of the madness produced by taking henbane. Woman's milk also, mixed with hemlock, is recommended as a liniment for gout; while some there are who employ it for that purpose in combination with wool-grease⁷ or goose-grease; a form in which it is used as an application for pains in the uterus. Taken as a drink, it arrests diarrhœa, Rabirius⁸ says, and acts as an emmenagogue; but where the woman has been delivered of a female child, her milk is of use only for the cure of face diseases.

Woman's milk is also a cure for affections of the lungs; and, mixed with the urine of a youth who has not arrived at puberty, and Attic honey, in the proportion of one spoonful of each, it removes singing in the ears, I find. Dogs which have once tasted the milk of a woman who has been delivered of a male child, will never become mad, they say.

1 There is probably no foundation for this assertion.

2 "Rana." He means the "rubeta" probably, or "bramble-frog," so often mentioned by him. See Note 84, p. 290.

3 "Salivam."

4 See B. xx. c. 2.

5 See B. xxx. c. 10. Latreille has written a very able treatise on the Buprestis of the ancients, and considers it to belong to the family of Cantharides. Alnnales du Museum d'histoire Naturelle, Vol. xix. p. 129, et seq.

6 Convolvulus dorycnium; see B. xxi. c. 105, and B. xxiii. c. 18.

7 "Œsypum." See B. xxx. c. 23.

8 Possibly the Epic writer of that name, mentioned by Ovid, Seneca, Quintilian, and Velleius Paterculus.

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.

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Pliny the Elder, The Natural History
John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.

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CHAP. 21.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOMAN'S MILK.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.

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CHAP. 21.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOMAN'S MILK.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History
John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.