Not long after this business, in fact, in February, 1752, Lady Mary was reporting that she was well enough in health.  She had been reading Coventry’s Pompey the Little, and tells her daughter that she saw herself in the character of Mrs. Qualmsick: 

“You will be surprised at this, no Englishwoman being so free from vapours, having never in my life complained of low spirits or weak nerves; but our resemblance is very strong in the fancied loss of appetite, which I have been silly enough to be persuaded into by the physician of this place.  He visits me frequently, as being one of the most considerable men in the parish, and is a grave, sober thinking great fool, whose solemn appearance, and deliberate way of delivering his sentiments gives them an air of good sense, though they are often the most injudicious that ever were pronounced.  By perpetual telling me I eat so little, he is amazed I am able to subsist, he had brought me to be of his opinion; and I began to be seriously uneasy at it.  This useful treatise has roused me into a recollection of what I eat yesterday, and do almost every day the same.  I wake generally about seven, and drink half a pint of warm asses’ milk, after which I sleep two hours; as soon as I am risen, I constantly take three cups of milk coffee, and hours after that a large cup of milk chocolate:  two hours more brings my dinner, where I never fail swallowing a good dish (I don’t mean plate) of gravy soup, with all the bread, roots, &c., belonging to it.  I then eat a wing and the whole body of a large fat capon, and a veal sweetbread, concluding with a competent quantity of custard, and some roasted chestnuts.  At five in the afternoon I take another dose of asses’ milk; and for supper twelve chestnuts (which would weigh twenty-four of those in London), one new laid egg, and a handsome porringer of white bread and milk.  With this diet, notwithstanding the menaces of my wise doctor, I am now convinced I am in no danger of starving; and am obliged to Little Pompey for this discovery.”

Two years later, however, when she was in her sixty-fifth year, Lady Mary found herself far from well.  In April of that year, she told her daughter:  “My time is wholly dedicated to the care of a decaying body, and endeavouring, as the old song says, to grow wiser and better, as my strength wears away.”  Shortly after, she was taken seriously unwell at Gottolengo.  When she had recovered she, always interested in medical science, sent Lady Bute a full account of her illness and of the extraordinary physician from the neighbouring village of Lovere.