This chapter focuses on how doctors and laypeople measured the patient's growing strength after illness, and analyses the physiological processes through which this restitution was thought to occur. It shows that both the measures and the mechanisms for the restoration of strength were intimately connected to the 'six Non-Natural things': excretion, sleep, food, passions, air and exercise. Patients' sleeping patterns, appetites for foods, and emotions, along with other inclinations and behaviours that related to the Non-Naturals, were used to track their progression on 'the road to health'. The Non-Naturals played two vital functions during convalescence in early modern England. The first was prognostic: the manifestation of each Non-Natural acted as a measure of the patient's growing strength. The second role was therapeutic: the manipulation of the Non-Naturals was the chief means through which strength and flesh were restored.
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.