ABSTRACT
Michael Stolberg’s chapter looks at the 70-page manuscript diary of regimen kept in the 1650s by the French historian, soldier and diplomat François-Nicolas Baudot, sieur Dubuisson-Aubenay. In this private journal, a valuable source for the patient’s view of the subject, he recorded his excretions in great detail, illuminating contemporary views on dietetics and the physiological processes behind them. He emphasises that the eighteenth-century conception of the humoral system was important in different ways from the Classical model of balance, focusing more on the ideas of impurity and stagnation. Excretion remained key in this newer view, removing “peccant humours” from the body that otherwise would cause illness. Stolberg shows how the ageing body was understood to accumulate excess impure “excremental matter,” weakening the innate heat on which physiological processes depended. He also discusses the way that excretion and retention, with their connection to emetics, purgatives and so forth, overlapped more with therapeutics than many other non-naturals.
