ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the notion of disease and its representation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, as it was expressed in written correspondence between medical practitioners and their patients. Epistolary consultations were provided for the most part by university-trained physicians, who represented only a part of the available resource that patients could turn to. In composing their consultations, physicians took the opportunity to expound their medical knowledge, but, at the same time were cognizant of the likely level of medical knowledge of their clients. Contemporary medical dictionaries offer little guidance on physicians' understandings of disease. The physician had to attribute cause in order to provide a rational basis for therapy. University-educated physicians were trained in and largely followed humoral theory, that is, that disease resulted from an imbalance of the innate humours in the body, black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm.
