ABSTRACT
The enabling and reassuring function performed by the adoption of daily preservative and preventative measures helps to explain the success of regimens of health in the age of print, and of their companion genre, the books of secrets. The latter included many remedies that were preventive, rather than therapeutic, especially recipes for assisting in the hygienic operations required by a body, which was increasingly represented as continuously excremental and in need of regular cleansing. Along with remedies designed to heal the sick body, prophylactic recipes advice therefore occupy considerable space in the literature of secrets. Regimens pay more attention to the domestic interior. Regimens encouraged readers to inhale aromatic substances from little bags and sprinkle their garments and gloves with scented waters or powders. According to humoural theory, bodily hygiene was classified as a form of purging or evacuation of superfluities that built up in various parts of the body during the processes whereby food was turned into physical matter.
