This paper's goal is to examine the topos of curative laughter, by means of the digital humanities. Is this idea truly specific and recurrent throughout the early modern collections of merry tales? To determine if this is the case, we used a freeware corpus analysis toolkit to check on various peritexts, that head 89 jestbooks, 158 comic literary works, and 311 serious works, published in French between the end of the XVth century and 1699. We carried out a quantitative and qualitative study about the way the lexicon linked to health, cure and medicine is used in each corpus. We could thus highlight the specificity of collections gathering jests and merry tales. It does not lie only in the claim that relaxation is good for health (a claim they share with all comic works), but also and more precisely in the recurrent use of the word melancholy, for commercial purposes and legitimation of pleasure. Specific as well is the link between pseudo-medical considerations and other practical tips about the uses of a book designed for collective consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]