It's uncanny

I read with great interest the suggestion by Abraham Ohry and Jenni Tsafrir that chicken soup be considered an essential drug.1 I endorse this recommendation on the basis of my interpretation of the medical writings of the renowned 12th century physician Moses Maimonides.

Ohry and Tsafrir quoted Maimonides' recommendations that chicken soup be used to treat leprosy, migraine, constipation and the "black humours" (an excess of which was thought to cause melancholy). In his Medical Aphorisms2 Maimonides also made several other recommendations. He stated that the consumption of fowl is beneficial for feebleness, hemiplegia, facial paresis and the pain of edema and that it increases sexual potential. He advised that turtledoves increase memory, improve intellect and sharpen the senses and that house pigeons that graze in the streets increase natural body heat. Soup made from the bird called kanaber loosens cramps of colic. Chicken testicles provide excellent nourishment for a weakened or convalescent individual. Pigeon eggs are good aphrodisiacs, especially when cooked with onion or turnip. Soup made from an old chicken is of benefit against chronic fevers that develop from white bile, and it also aids the cough that is called asthma.

In his Treatise on Asthma,3 Maimonides advised asthma sufferers to consume the soup of chickens or fat hens. He strongly endorsed the use of an enema with sap of linseed, fenugreek or both, with oil and chicken fat and an admixture of beet juice, to treat asthma.

It thus seems evident that Maimonides, in the 12th century, gave scientific respectability to what the proverbial Jewish mother has always known - that chicken soup can help cure a variety of ailments.4