On 29 December 1578 Bess wrote that Mary was ‘growed lene and seckely’, but towards the end of her confinement the queen had the opposite problem, becoming stout with grossly swollen legs. Mary had been repeatedly and seriously ill from at least her teenage years, but her health certainly deteriorated in captivity, and in 1572 she made the first of many requests to visit the spa at Buxton. Her repeated complaints of pain in her side might suggest acute intermittent porphyria, a diagnosis also tentatively proposed for Arbella Stuart, who was subject to fits of incoherence and ultimately starved herself to death. Bess was a more robust person, but she too was sometimes ill, and so was Shrewsbury, who may have suffered dementia and/or a series of small ischaemic strokes. This chapter draws on the ‘receipt’ books of two of Bess’s granddaughters, the Countess of Arundel and the Countess of Kent, and argues that the ways in which the two women approached recipes and remedies can help us glimpse something of what probably happened at Chatsworth and at Sheffield Castle during the time of Mary’s imprisonment.