In an era where processed foods dominate grocery shelves and pharmaceutical solutions reign supreme, the idea of drinking raw milk exclusively for weeks might seem radical. Yet this practice was once so mainstream that prestigious medical institutions routinely prescribed it as legitimate therapy.
Last Thanksgiving, regenerative farmer Mollie Engelhart embarked on what she describes as less of an experiment and more of a historical journey. Her weeks-long raw milk fast began with a simple curiosity about Bifidobacteria—the beneficial gut bacteria that flourish in breastfed infants. If nature designed milk in its unprocessed form to build immune and metabolic foundations in the most vulnerable humans, she wondered what returning to “living” milk might mean for adults.
What Engelhart discovered through her research proved far more fascinating than her personal 18-day November fast or subsequent 46-day Lenten period consuming roughly a gallon of raw milk daily. She uncovered a forgotten chapter of American medical history where unpasteurized milk wasn’t fringe medicine—it was standard practice.
When Mayo Clinic Prescribed Milk as Medicine
Before the Mayo Clinic became today’s world-renowned medical powerhouse, it operated under a fundamentally different philosophy. Nutrition, rest, sunlight, and fresh air weren’t alternative treatments—they were legitimate components of mainstream medical care.
Dr. J.R. Crewe, a Mayo-associated physician, developed what became known as “the milk cure.” His protocol involved patients consuming exclusively raw milk—unpasteurized, unhomogenized, and ideally sourced from grass-fed cows. This approach aligned with respected medical minds of the era, including the influential physician William Osler.
Importantly, today’s Mayo Clinic advises against raw milk consumption, warning that unpasteurized dairy products could lead to infection and recommending only pasteurized milk products.
Crewe wasn’t pioneering uncharted territory. Late 1800s physicians like Silas Weir Mitchell and James Tyson employed similar protocols. Medical practitioners of that era viewed raw milk as a complete food—sometimes poetically called “white blood” due to its naturally occurring enzymes, proteins, beneficial bacteria, fats, minerals, and other bioactive compounds.
The Scale of a Forgotten Practice
Over nearly four decades, Dr. Crewe treated thousands of patients using raw milk therapy, meticulously documenting his observations. The most striking aspect wasn’t any specific medical claim, but rather the sheer normalcy and scale of the practice. Raw milk occupied a standard place in physicians’ therapeutic toolkit—making its complete disappearance from modern medical discourse seem almost mysterious.
The vanishing of raw milk from mainstream medicine reflects broader cultural and systemic shifts rather than decisive scientific debate. Early 20th-century pasteurization laws emerged to address legitimate problems stemming from industrialized milk production: urban dairies, overcrowded animals, and poor sanitation standards. However, these regulations were designed for large-scale operations, not small, pasture-based farms.
As food production increasingly moved toward industrial models and medicine embraced pharmaceutical approaches, raw milk simply faded from mainstream practice. It wasn’t argued out of existence through medical discourse—it disappeared as the entire system transformed around it.
Modern Context and Historical Perspective
Contemporary warnings about raw milk typically address risks inherent in modern industrial supply chains, not the type of milk utilized by early 20th-century physicians. This crucial distinction rarely enters public discourse, contributing to the gap in understanding about historical medical practices.
Today’s health landscape presents a stark contrast to that earlier era. Chronic illness affects unprecedented numbers of Americans, autoimmune conditions impact millions, and ultra-processed foods constitute the majority of the average diet. Against this backdrop, looking back a century to see raw milk—whole, unprocessed, direct from grass-fed animals—treated as foundational medical nutrition seems almost surreal.
Raw milk exists in nature for a singular purpose: building and sustaining life. Whether this biological function holds relevance for modern adults remains a matter of personal belief, individual context, and informed choice.
Rediscovering Forgotten Wisdom
The famous Hippocratic principle—”Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”—often gets quoted as metaphor. Yet in its original context, this wasn’t symbolic language. It acknowledged that food carries information and biological structure, not merely calories.
For Engelhart, consuming raw milk didn’t feel experimental but rather like “returning to something deeply familiar.” Her experience highlights a broader question about how previous generations approached the relationship between nutrition and health—applying observations and accumulated knowledge that have largely vanished from contemporary practice.
The goal isn’t to prescribe raw milk as a panacea for modern ailments or suggest it holds miraculous properties. Instead, examining this forgotten medical history offers an opportunity to expand understanding of the complex relationship between humans, nourishment, and the natural world.
Our predecessors worked with food as medicine in ways modern society rarely considers. Revisiting that historical approach doesn’t require adopting their specific practices, but it might illuminate overlooked connections between traditional wisdom and contemporary health challenges.
Sometimes the most profound discoveries involve not finding something revolutionary, but remembering something ordinary—practices that were once simple, rooted in how humans understood their place in the natural world before industrial food systems and pharmaceutical medicine reshaped that relationship entirely.
As chronic health conditions continue rising alongside increasingly processed food systems, perhaps there’s value in examining what our medical predecessors understood about whole foods that we’ve forgotten. Whether raw milk specifically holds answers matters less than the broader question: What other traditional nutritional wisdom disappeared when medicine and agriculture industrialized?
