There is a drug in your Christmas box. You probably ate some of it last December, wrapped in gold foil, shaped like a little fruit or a smooth pale loaf. It is just sweet almond candy. At least, that is what you think it is. Because for most of its life, the soft almond paste we call marzipan was not a treat at all. It was a prescription. You did not buy it at a bakery. You bought it from an apothecary, the closest thing the medieval world had to a pharmacy, and you ate it because a physician told you it would make you well. Today a single company in the German city of Lübeck turns out around thirty tonnes of the stuff a day in the run-up to Christmas. Thirty tonnes. Of a former medicine. This is the story of how a drug quietly became a dessert, and how almost nobody noticed the moment it changed.
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