“There exists a certain strength in elk, and a deer is a pure animal.” This indisputably true statement, given in a set of instructions for repelling demonic apparitions by means of an elk hide belt fastened with steel pins, comes from Causae et Curae, Hildegard of Bingen’s treatise on natural philosophy and various medicines animal, vegetable, and mineral. If you squinted, and gave yourself up to a certain mischievous perversity, you could call it a wellness manual.

Hildegard, abbess and polymath, wrote her manual in the middle of the twelfth century. Since then, the publishing niche occupied by such manuals has grown radically. My father, I suspect, would disapprove of this. Wellness, he said when canvassed for his opinion, is “not something normal people talk about.” This is a common position. Wellness has been much and eloquently abused – wellness is late capitalism, wellness is Gnosticism, wellness is for those with more money than sense, wellness is the special purview of the most insufferable women on God’s green earth – and it is hard not to see that the abusers have a point.

For centuries women have sought the elixir of wellness.