[Interpretative margins and narrative authority in the autobiographical account of illness].

Patients' letters are among historical sources that have been recently put forward in the history of medicine in order to shed light on the perspective of the sick and explore the dynamics of therapeutic relationships. They enable historians to focus on the active participation, initiatives and strategies of lay people in the handling of their health and illness. Based on the analysis of letters written by patients to the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot in the second part of the 18th Century, this paper deals with the relative autonomy that sick people are able to claim in the process of interpreting and explaining of their medical trajectories.

[Medical consultation by letter in the 18th century].

Medical consultations by letter are especially abundant in the 18th century; recent research in the history of medicine has focused on this kind of archives, hoping to get a better idea of lay medical culture and medical practice, everyday life of the patient in the early modern period, private experience of suffering, relationships between popular knowledge and medical theories of illness, as well as the major factors of the doctor-patient relationship. However, to interpret them is not an easy nor an univocal task. This article suggests to analyse medical consultations by letter as an elaborate practice, starting from the communicational structure of the material in order to legitimate a two-scale approach, i.