The value of diaries and correspondence as source materials for many aspects of research has long been appreciated by historians to reveal contemporary information about daily life, fashion, architecture, politics, travel, spiritual reflections, agriculture, industry, weather and even folk-lore. In the past historians with an interest in these categories have used letters and journals as indispensable accounts of attitudes and thoughts, facts, events and personalities not recorded elsewhere, and to support or contradict alternative information. However, these same accounts also contain a substantial amount of material about patients, medical practitioners and contemporary responses to illness and health in a particularly immediate and first hand way. Recovering the medical information from such sources is a slow rather than a difficult procedure, but provides facts and opinions about the patient's illness and health not to be found anywhere else in eighteenth century material. Recent work to reconstruct community life in the past has already shown the value of this new approach in research. The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how fragments from diaries and letters may be considered alongside each other and in relation to other sources to provide a picture of eighteenth century medicine from the recipients' view.