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

VI. Secondly, some imagine that many people are averse to eating cheese because they are persuaded that eating it is lethal, and that through its use such diseases are stirred up in the body as pave the way to death. Certainly, both things that are alleged are perhaps true; and before we respond, we will deduce two points somewhat more distinctly. 1. How harmful cheese is to health, and 2. How much the apprehension of food, as something harmful to health, contributes to aversion toward it. The former will be clear if we show that cheese procures both death and lethal diseases. Therefore, as for death, the history that Julius Capitolinus presents in the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, chapter 12, is worthy of observation, speaking thus: His death, he says, is narrated to have been of this kind: when he had eaten Alpine Cheese more greedily than usual at supper, he vomited it back up during the night, and on the next day he was moved by a fever. On the third day, when he saw that he was burdened, he commended the Republic and his daughter to Marcus Antoninus in the presence of the prefects, and ordered the golden Fortune, which was accustomed to be placed in the bedroom of the princes, to be transferred to him; he gave the signal of equanimity to the tribune: and thus, turning as if he were sleeping, he gave up his spirit at Lorium, alienated in fever, speaking of nothing else than the Republic and the kings with whom he was angry. So he writes. Compare Johannes Cuspininian in the life of the same Emperor. That indeed the same inconvenience that happened to Antoninus has been procured in many others by eating cheese, is testified by Iosephus Quercetanus, an Hermetic philosopher and not an obscure physician, in Dietetic Polyhistory, chapter 6, page 463:

So widespread and frequent is the use of cheese in many places, he says, that even the Savoyards and the Swiss, both of the lower and upper order, use almost no other side dish than that alone.