Tractatus medicus de cura lactis in Arthritide, in quo indagata natura lactis & Arthritidis tandem rationibus, & experientiis allatis diaeta lactea optima Arthritidem curandi methodus proponitur.

Bookseller Notes

Scarce in commerce is this first edition of this work on the medicinal effects of milk - including breast milk - on arthritis. Even amongst shifting and complex societal attitudes towards breastfeeding, the use of human milk was not without precedent in European medicine. It was already 'recommended for tuberculosis and eye diseases, even dropsy, as the only existing remedy until the late eighteenth century', and here is suggested as a cure for arthritis, as part of a diet rich in general milk products. Johann Georg Greisel (d. 1684) was an Austrian army doctor and professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna. This is his only known published work, and was reprinted 1681. (See: Jutta Gisela Sperling, Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Routledge, 2016) p. 10)