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

that is meager, it harms the stomach, and when by chance it has been overheated in the body, as Galen writes explicitly in the third book, chapter 6, of Diseases of the Afflicted Parts, it easily produces a melancholic humor. Fresh cheese is indeed less flatulent, but it stops the bowels more and is more thirst-inducing, nor is it any less harmful for the procreation of stones in the kidneys. Moreover, it is the worst food for those who have filled themselves with drink, as Hippocrates shows most clearly in book 4 of Diet in Acute Diseases, Aphorism 92. It burdens the orifice of the stomach, and is the first to spoil, and successively spoils other things with it. So writes Villanovanus. Furthermore, since it delights in a burning, salty, and biting acrimony, it cannot fail to erode the throat and kindle thirst, according to the authors Cornelius Celsus, book 2, chapter 30, Aegineta in his book on Diet, and especially Galen in book 10 of On the Faculties of Simple Medicines. Furthermore, since it has the nature of a thick and viscous food (as Alsarius Crucius excellently proves in Epistle 2), it is no wonder that it generates in the body thick, burnt, and melancholic humors, which are a sink of various diseases, and specifically also constipates the bowels and stuffs the kidneys with slime. Certainly, Avicenna decorates cheese with this testimony, and indeed truly in part, in book 2, Tract 2, chapter 126: It generates a stone in the kidneys. Which all such harms (if only the reason is to be sought from here) one will apprehend much more if he has thought distinctly about what Galen says in the aforementioned or book 10 of On the Faculties of Simple Medicines. Furthermore, he says, these, as well as the rest, will all appear more acrid to you in the passage of time, whether you taste or smell them; thus, when some cow’s cheese was brought to me, which I conjectured was acrid from its smell, I threw it away: and I thought it had been consumed by the servants. However, they, accustomed to keeping such things, brought it out from the pantry a long time later and asked what I ordered to be done with it. Since it was not for eating, on account of its acrimony, it became a playful problem for us, with us proposing: for what thing could one use it profitably? Meanwhile, when an Arthritic gout sufferer had been carried to me in a carriage, having tophi concretions/stony deposits, which the Greeks call poroi tufa/stones, in his joints: it occurred to me to soak cheese in the salty juice that was boiled within it, and after pounding it well in a mortar, to apply it to the tophi while unified. And truly, the arthritic was magnificently helped by this medicine. For with the skin having ruptured on its own accord, that is without incision, particles of the tophi flowed out daily, without pain, etc. And lest anyone perhaps dream that fresh cheese was in better standing with this Galen, let him hear