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Milk: history
The history of milk is linked to the history of man from the earliest times, certainly from the start of herding and breeding. 8000 years ago Mesopotamian populations were already attempting to domesticate milk-producing animals and it is highly likely that already in those times man was trying to use and work with milk for food purposes.
Ancient Rome contributed an important chapter in the history of milk and its derivatives. The ancient Greeks were different in that they only drank sheep's milk. In Rome they began using cow's milk as food and as a raw material in the production of cheese, indeed it was the Romans who spread cheesemaking techniques around the many provinces of the empire. Latin literature has left us many references on this matter, the first one being the myth of the foundation of the city where Romolus and Remus were orphaned and were brought up on the milk of a she-wolf, and the argument between Marco Terenzio Marrone and Columella in the Ist century B.C. on the best techniques for making cheese.
In ancient and medieval medicine milk was considered to be an "excess" from the organism resulting from the whitening of the blood cells by the breasts. It has always stimulated great interest and in all eras milk was renowned for its great nutritional qualities. Over time milk has been attributed to have various and disparate soothing medicinal qualities (for the chest and lungs), dermatological remedies (for the color of the skin), a hepatic remedy (as anti-occlusive), intestinal remedy (as a lubricant to heal ulcers), digestive remedy (to sooth heart burn). For example, Avicenna said milk was a balm against migraines, while later the Greek botanist Dioscoride maintained that milk was a cure against poison.
Over the centuries and in its progress, medical science did deal with milk, its potential therapeutic uses and its nutritional values. Medical development have given us more effective means to treat illnesses than the "alchemies" of the past. Nonetheless milk still holds traces of its glorious past as a medicine, in its more or less household use as a cure for lesser ills (think of all the proverbial cups of milk, honey and whisky that have been drunk as a remedy against the common cold), and as an "ingredient" in bodycare products (facial beauty masks, soaps, detergents…), all of which are diect descendants of Cleopatra and Poppea's baths in milk.
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