Premodern ‘Galaktology’: Reading Milk in Ancient and Early Byzantine Medical Treatises

Abstract

Extant medical treatises from Greco-Roman antiquity and early Byzantium (second–seventh century CE) repeatedly foreground human milk as a therapeutic and a nutritional agathon (good), but also as a potential cause of malfunctioning and disease. Through a discussion of the juxtaposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ milk in the examined treatises, along with an investigation of the milk terminology and rhetoric employed, this article shows that milk’s usefulness was primarily defined not according to its effects on the human body, but in terms of the producer’s moral worth: the lactating woman’s (i.e. biological mother’s or wet nurse’s) ability to meet certain moral standards.