Honey by Lucy Long

Author:Lucy Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The Greeks and Romans similarly referred to honey’s power to heal wounds and illnesses and believed that consuming honey contributed to a person’s longevity. The fourth-century BC philosophers Aristotle and Aristoxenus both commended honey. It was understood to be a source of energy and was consumed by athletes in the ancient Olympic Games in order to enhance performance. Pliny the Elder, around the first century AD, suggested mixing honey with ‘powdered bees’ to cure dropsy, constipation, urinary tract and bladder infections, and kidney stones. He also advised that consuming raw honey was an effective laxative, but boiling it would cure diarrhoea, and that honey from toxic plants could cure epilepsy.

King Solomon in the Old Testament seemed to encourage people to eat honey for their health, claiming ‘My Son, eat thou honey, for it is good’ (Proverbs 24:13) – although its goodness can also refer to its taste and sweetness. The many references to the Promised Land as one of milk and honey, though, suggests that honey represented abundance, fertility and well-being.

Similarly, the Qu’ran states that ‘There comes from within [the bee] a beverage of many colours, in which there is healing for men’ (16:69), and the Prophet Mohammad claimed that ‘Honey is a remedy for every illness of the body and the Quran is a remedy for all illnesses of the mind. Therefore I recommend to you both remedies, the Quran and honey.’5

Early European cultures also treated honey as a tonic, medicine and protector against disease. They used it as an ointment on wounds and applied it to the skin, partly to help hold the skin together or in place, but also to help healing. Burns were frequently treated topically with honey, and honey was consumed as a tonic for good health. Various concoctions were recorded, such as honey and pigeon dung mixed together to treat kidney stones; Hippocrates’ recipe from the fifth century BC of ‘powdered viper’ sweetened with honey, which was re-used centuries later for protection against the Plague that decimated populations in the mid-1300s; and an English ointment from the mid-1440s that called for duck grease, turpentine, soot, molasses, egg yolks and scorpion oil mixed with honey.6

Honey was also used in Europe to ‘sweeten’ the task of collecting ‘night soil’ – human faeces – that had to be carried away from homes to be deposited outside. The poor souls conducting the task would wrap cloths soaked in honey around their mouths and nostrils, hence the term ‘honey bucket’ for the pots used for the waste.

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