'The very women read it': Medical selffashioning, mythologies and (mis)information in George Cheyne MD's medical writings

'The very women read it' is a quotation taken, not from the popular society medic George Cheyne (1672-1743), but from the poet Alexander Pope, who is talking about William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), a work that attracted the attention of the fashionable sort. Pope went on to condemn the trivialization and misrepresentation of religious, natural-philosophical and medical knowledge in the beau monde. Cheyne's Essay of Health enjoyed tremendous success and reached out far beyond the traditional bounds of medical works in his attempt both to project an image of himself as champion of health to a wider audience (including women) than his fellow male professionals, and to provide accurate medical information in a world of misinformation and mythology. Perhaps the main reason for this popularity, apart from the simplicity of his message, with the ladies as well as the gentlemen (and even down the social orders), was Cheyne's conscious effort to write in an accessible, literary style. Cheyne, I argue, was building on the achievements of previously innovative medics writing in the vernacular, such as Richard Blackmore (1654-1729). This chapter will also explore the way in which Cheyne became a fashionable and effective writing doctor by exploiting his own ailments, his own 'crazy carcase', in a new form of apparently, and paradoxically, more truthful medical self-fashioning. Key to this fashioning and fashionability was Cheyne's choice of language and genre, and his innovative shaping of that genre to his own creative vision of medical writing.