Les singulières conversions du lait maternel à l’époque classique. Approche médicale et biologique

Abstract

For the physicians of the Hippocratic collection as well as for Aristotle, milk and sperm are issued from blood. It all depends on a differentiated coction, the male reaching optimal humour while the female, on account of her “nature”, “only” manages to produce milk, an essential foodstuff however for the infant after birth. Thus blood and milk are two humours so feminine, two “sister” yet antinomic substances and two stages in procreation, which must not be overlapping but follow each other in the chronology of the mechanism and chemistry of the female body. Milk is a humour both vital and necessary, and yet strange and disturbing, a liquid with multiple powers that arouses phantasma and fosters at the same time ideological representations and constructions.

Keywords

• milk
• blood
• Hippocrates
• Aristotle
• transmission