Disputatio physica expendens rationes & caussas, cur plurimi ab esu casei abhorreant

the Epistle to Lambertus Grunnius edited by Scriverius, where, as he describes his own adolescence under the persona of the boy Florentius, he has this among other things: "The youth so abhorred fish that he would immediately feel a severe headache, not without fever, just from the smell." Second to Erasmus is that Spaniard of whom Amatus Lusitanus speaks thus in Book 2, Curation 36: "We know another who had never tasted fish, so that when he was once invited to dinner by a friend, and the friend deliberately fed him a fish covered in eggs, he fell into mental anguish and pressures of the heart with vomiting and purging, such that he was near to losing his spirit entirely and dying." This man was named Stephanus Surdafter, by nationality a Spaniard, by birth a Toletan. So far Amatus. Thus it is no wonder that some tremble at eels. For not without cause does Juvenal seem to have said in Satire 5:

"The eel awaits you, a relative of the long snake."

Ambrosius Pareus has an example in Introduction to Surgery, chapter 22, where he writes thus: "I knew a man of the primary nobility among the peers of France who, when an eel was placed before him, in the midst of a feast and among a group of friendly companions, was so confounded that he suddenly fell into a precipitous loss of all his strength." Such is Pareus. Another seems to have been known to Weinrichius, for in his Commentary on Monsters, chapter 8, page 65, these things are read: "We know a man who could not suffer not only the smell, appearance, and eating of eels, but could not even be in a house where they were hidden alive without significant anxiety." Others have no less abhorred the meat of quadrupeds (which are wont to be simply called and considered meat). Thus you may read in the aforementioned Amatus: "We know many who abhorred the eating of meat entirely." Scaliger has a singular example in Exercitationes 153, section 10: "One of our women, regarded for both beauty and virtue, named Francisca, who later bore Christophorus, a man of great name and power, to Matthia Phrigepanus, a great and distinguished nobleman, could not be moved by any persuasion before her fourteenth year to eat meat." To which must be added the example that Brasavolus has in his Commentary 34 on Hippocrates' On Regimen in Acute Diseases, speaking thus: "We saw the most illustrious younger daughter of the Taraconian King Frederick of Naples, and we brought aid to her with medical remedies, who could not eat meat, nor even taste it. Indeed, if she placed a morsel in her mouth, she fell into a most vehement faint, and she would wail with a loud cry, falling to the ground and rolling about; and this happened for the space of half an hour, after which she would return to herself." If all the Greeks had been possessed of this temperament in the past, Triptolemus