Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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“Under the Galenical system, the way to increase the power of a remedy was to add more and more plants that had the opposite action from the humor that was supposedly causing the illness. Thus, a remedy for someone ill with a fever or an excess of choler—that is, the warm-dry humor—would be a mixture of plants [regarded as]…cooling and moist in quality. No other characteristics of the illness or the remedies were as important as the fever. The medical alchemists rejected that logic and proposed instead that diseases were uniquely different and required specific remedies….Slowly the concept that each disease should be treated with a specific remedy was beginning to contradict the old notions….But the demise of the four Aristotelian elements for most chemists was not to come until later in the 17th century when Robert Boyle published *The Sceptical Chymist* in 1661 in which he argued convincingly that both Aristotle and Paracelsus were wrong.” http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/5/3/144