Lady Mildmay's medical writings include instructions for making up medicines (not individual prescriptions but remedies to be manufactured in bulk), and sophisticated analysis of the causes and treatment of various diseases, based on the humours theory of Galen as well as on Christian writers. She argued for moderation, maintaining that it was a dangerous thing to wear and distract the humours in the body by extreme purges or extreme cordials. She lists treatments according to the perceived causes of disease (attributing smallpox, for instance, the arch enemy of this masterpiece of nature, to the abundant putrefaction of blood and phlegm in the vessels of the spleen or matrix). She adds lists of substances which affect different parts of the body, and recipes for medicaments.

As a boy Philip survived an attack of smallpox that left him badly scarred—a fact not evident from the paintings of him.

Mary Sidney's mother, the former Lady Mary Dudley , came from a powerful family. Her brothers, all players on the national scene, included Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She lost her beauty by smallpox when her daughter Mary was a toddler.

She had survived a bout of smallpox about eighteen months before this.

LED marked the death from smallpox of her elder grandson with Sions Lamentation, Lord Henry Hastings , His Funerals Blessing.

LAC , along with her daughter Margaret, was ill with smallpox during her husband's last illness, and they were both unable to visit him. Although she survived the illness, it permanently scarred her face.

Unspecified illnesses coming one after another kept her housebound for years. Passages in her poems suggest that she was disabled in some way and possibly disfigured (by, for instance, smallpox).

Soon after the women's imprisonment they were so badly stung by mosquitoes while asleep at night that their faces became as unrecognisably swollen as if they had smallpox. Their health suffered severely from other factors, such as heat and hunger-strikes, and each one was several times near death.

On the day her marriage contract with John Hutchinson was signed, Lucy Apsley went down with smallpox. She lost her looks at least temporarily, but kept her suitor.

After being brought up in the Herbert family, Lady Mary Villiers was given away (not yet in her teens) in a dynastic marriage, celebrated with great pomp on 8 January 1635, to Charles, Lord Herbert (grandson of the Countess of Pembroke , the poet). He was then sent off to complete his education by travelling in Europe, and died of smallpox in January 1636.

EW 's account of her own life shows her pride in her forebears and her pleasure in anecdotes from which she can draw a moral lesson. She treats her childbirth experiences succinctly, linking them to her thanksgiving to God for deliverance. She goes into more detail about family illnesses, where medical specifics accompany the words of prayer and religious meditation. She writes what the Quakers would call testimonies on the dead, beginning with her daughter Mary, who sweetly fell asleep in Jesus Christ at the age of six and a quarter on 21 January 1669, after being ill for four days with a sudden, violent sore throat. She touchingly describes the child's piety and her acceptance of the prospect of her own death, recording her hope that Mary is now happy in heaven. Like Mary Carey she concludes her account of her dead child by turning to the living: Lord I bless thee that of Eleven, for whom I Praise thee, thou hast yet spared me two. The death of her daughter Elizabeth at sixteen and a quarter from smallpox elicits a parallel narrative of loss, grief, and soul-searching, including a story of how the young Elizabeth once feared she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the sin which would not be forgiven. Again EW turns to the living: I bless thee that thou still intrusts us Parents to a Child.

The twenty-year-old son of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick , died of smallpox, leaving her crushed by sorrow and guilt.

The child lived only fifteen days, and before those fifteen days were over Ann's husband had to part with her for the first time since their wedding, and leave for Bristol. She had a total of six sons and eight daughters borne and christned between this date and 6 August 1665. But deaths of children followed hard on births, and within about a year of her last childbirth there had been nine deaths: a few in infancy, but several others after surviving well into their childhood. ALF had also miscarried four times. One of her miscarriages followed the death of her then eldest son of smallpox, when she says she neglected her daughters, struck down by the same epidemic, to tend her son.

These prose writings, predominantly religious in tone, are like Jane Cavendish 's writings almost all connected with family. Here, however, the family is not a network of individuals wielding power in the social sphere, but a succession of babies prone to illness and, all too frequently, to death. Lady Bridgewater writes frequently and eloquently about pregnancy, labour, child illnesses, and child death, in a collection amounting, as Travitsky argues, to a kind of autobiography of her own most challenging experiences. Perhaps the collection most like this one from the period was written by Mary Carey , who took the opposite side from Lady Bridgewater in the English Civil War, but shared with her the experience of striving for a properly pious response to God's taking away her children. Lady Bridgewater's titles are self-explanatory. A Prayer when I was with Child is a title used for several prayers, one of which thanks God for the blessing of her son and daughter who lived long enough to be christened, and beseeches: when I come to the cruell grones of labour, in this my travaile giue me patience. A late example is entitled, as if she now needs to be more careful over distinguishing them, A Prayer when I was with Child of Stuart. A Prayer in time of Labour calls that time this height of paine.A Prayer after I was brought to Bed says thou art ever mercyfull and hast brought us at this time from many and great dangers, and me from the great torture of Childbirth. Other speaking titles include A Prayer when I continued wth [sic] Child, after I thought I should have fallen in Labour (a tiny narrative), Upon occasion of the death of my Boy Henry (who died at twenty-nine days when his mother was twenty-nine years old: she prays that she may avoid wishing he had never been born), and When I lost my Deare Girle Kate (who died of smallpox at twenty-two months, a promising child, much loved by her brothers and sister, who would make her mind knowne at any time, & was kind to all, even to Strangers, & had no Anger in her). Two more poems on Kate follow.

She mentions having measles, and two attacks of smallpox (which would mean that one of them must have been chickenpox).

DO , now in London to prepare for her wedding to Sir William Temple , was ill with smallpox.

AA 's daughter from her second marriage, Sarah Camm, died of smallpox, at eleven days short of her ninth birthday.

After Queen Mary died of smallpox, JW was impelled by God to go from Putney, where she lived, to London proper, and call the people to fasting instead of feasting.

AC suffered a severe fever before the age of twelve, which seems to have brought on a tendency to excruciating headaches. These (probably migraine) recurred throughout her life, so often as to be almost permanent. Her all-round health, too, was fragile, and the medical treatments she underwent for her headaches sound in themselves enough to ensure ill-health. She went down with smallpox shortly after her only child died of it.

She herself suffered an attack of measles the same year as her miscarriage, and one of smallpox in 1660.

She had been in labour 4 or 5, five, days, attended by her aunt, her sister Lady Norton, four midwives, Lady Thynne (probably the mother of Thomas Thynne , later Viscount Weymouth, rather than his wife the literary patron), and a man-midwife. The latter was convinced the child was dead, and was putting on his butchers habitt to apply instruments for cutting it up inside the womb and so removing it, when my greatt and good God thatt never failed me (or deneyed my reasonable request) raised me up a good woman midwife, who had been recommended by Lady Thynne. She worked for two or three hours to deliver EF . The child appeared dead, hurt wth severall greatt holes in his head (made by the midwives' efforts); but he revived to be baptised that evening with her father's name. A month later he was again thought to be dead (and was removed from his mother to prepare for burial), but again recovered. At six months old he had his leg accidentally broken by a nurse who managed to keep this fact a secret for nearly three months, but eventually he recovered from his lameness also. He even survived smallpox at the age of ten.

FLN and her sister Elizabeth Freke did much visiting back and forth. It was in Frances's London house that her nephew Ralph went through smallpox in August 1684, and that Elizabeth sought refuge during the anxious period of Monmouth's rebellion in July 1685. Lady Norton's house in Somerset was also much frequented by the Freke family, often as a staging post on journeys back and forth between Norfolk and Ireland. In July 1704 she had Ralph Freke there with his wife, to whom she gave a necklace worth a hundred pounds; Elizabeth was there in August 1709. When Ralph and his wife had a daughter in April 1712, Frances and her sister Elizabeth were godparents together, and the baby was named Grace. The year after this Elizabeth remarked on my deer sister Norton giveing my son and daughters rude family the freedome of her house.