Recipe Collections and the Realities of Fashionable Diseases in Eighteenth-Century Elite Domestic Medicine

This chapter focuses on the individualistic nature of medicine by considering manuscript recipe collections, and the concerns and rhetoric of the elite patients who wrote about fashionable diseases and experienced them. Domestic medicine in the eighteenth century was a facet of elite health care that included commercial medicine and professional assistance. Looking broadly at the fashionability of health care, including the fashionability of the consumer goods and services linked to self-management and leisure time, reveals the realities of fashionable diseases in elite lives. The sociocultural rhetoric of fashionable diseases was incorporated into the recipe collecting tradition, but experiences of suffering and a need for care continued to be at the forefront of the discourse in domestic medicine and this writing tradition. This essay argues also that domestic rhetoric and experiences of fashionable disease were significantly driven by consumerism.