Although much of Thornwell's manual was extracted from E.C. de Calabrella's 1844 publication The Ladies' science of etiquette, the manual was popular enough to be reissued ten times between 1857 and 1890.
Originally published in 1870, Personal Beauty contains many Victorian recipes for health and beauty along with valuable and unusual advice for attaining physical perfection.
Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind.
Abstract: Die vorliegende Arbeit widmet sich der Frage nach den sozialen Praxen und gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungen von Schönheit bei den Karo Batak in Sumatra, Indonesien.