Natural and deliberate health: coping with health in German autobiographies from the 18th and 19 centuries.

Coping with illness is a topic well established in social psychology, and in other social sciences. In this essay I focus upon coping with health. I restrict myself to health as an invidivual activity. Starting with a differentiation between natural and deliberate health, which was made in the times of the Enlightenment, I look into alternative health accounts represented in German autobiographies.