http://www.smithsonianmag…

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-coffee-chocolate-and-tea-overturned-1500-year-old-medical-mindset-180963339/

Medicine at the time [was] intensely personal, writes David Gentilcore in Food and Healthy in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society. “Foods like cheese and wine might be converted into nourishing foods in some bodies, but could be poisons in others.” According to Galen, the first way physicians would treat illness was with food; surgery and cauterizing were a last option.