Hidden Mysteries

Kindly, Controversial Culpeper
(1616-1654)

Possibly the most famous herbal of all was The English Physician, written by Nicholas Culpeper and published in 1653. In 1649 Culpeper's English translations of the Latin Pharmacopoeias of the College of Physicians had been published. These books were extremely controversial and played a major role in the ultimate schism that developed between formal medicine and the practice of herbalism. Part of the blame for this lies in the fact that Culpeper was a believer in astrology, which led him to write that the planets governed both diseases and the plants used to treat them. But the controversy Culpeper provoked can also be attributed partly to the self interest and narrow minded dogmatism of the era's medical establishment.

Nicholas Culpeper was studying medicine at Cambridge when his fiancée was killed in a thunderstorm. Evidently overwhelmed by this tragedy, he gave up his studies and apprenticed himself to an apothecary. Eventually Culpeper set up his own healing practice near London. He was struck and saddened by the hardship of the working people he saw around him. To help these people, he began to sell them medicines cheap.

In Culpeper's London, restrictions governing who could, or could not treat illness were not nearly so strict as they are today. Physicians who had received formal training at university medical schools practiced side by side with apothecaries, alchemists, and other dispensers of medicines, including all manner of quacks.

As for herbal remedies, they still made up the major portion of the medicines and drugs listed in the pharmacopoeias of the day. However, medical fashion was swinging toward the use of various nonbotanical medications, some of which had been experimented with, off and on, since antiquity. Mercury (usually in the form of mercurious chloride, or calomel), arsenic, copper sulfate, iron and sulfur began to come more into vogue among 17th century physicians. Thus some treatments such as botanicals and metals were dispensed with equal license by formally schooled physicians and by apothecaries like Nicholas Culpeper. The physicians probably resented the competition and proceeded to try to discredit the popular Culpeper.

To some, Culpeper's theory of astrology was reason enough to discredit him. Even today though, there are passionate defenders of Culpeper who argue that his astrology was no more ridiculous and a lot less harmful than the physician's idea of curing a disease by letting huge amounts of blood out of a patient's veins, or the practice of administering powerful laxatives and emetics to purge one and restore one's humors to balance, or feeding a patient massive doses of mercury, now known to cause severe, permanent damage when it does not kill.

Furthermore, astrology was enjoying wide favor in Culpeper's England as well as in other parts of northern Europe. The German mystic Jakob Bohme had connected the movements and positions of heavenly bodies with herbal healings in his book "The Signature of All Things." Bohme was not the first to associate astrology and the practice of medicine. Such views reach perhaps as far back as 2000 B.C. to the ancient Babylonians.

So it seems that Culpeper may have incurred the wrath of the College of Physicians far less for his theories of medicine than because first, he came from outside their ranks, and the second, his A Physical Directory made the secrets of their Latin Pharmacopoeia more accessible to the English folk. Furthermore, because he felt that the traditional herbals relied too much on foreign plants, he told his patients where to find local species that worked just as well. And he charged lower fees than the physicians did.

Two other famous herbals entered the medical literature in the 17th century. "Theatrum Botanicum", published 1640 by John Parkinson, a renowned British herbalist and apothecary and the "Art of Simpling" by William Coles, who enthusiastically espoused the doctrine of signatures put forward by Paracelsus. "Simpling" in Coles' title derives from an old sense of the word simple, "medicinal herb."

Nevertheless it is Culpeper's The English Physician that is best known today. Periodically reissued under different titles and sometimes updated with modern commentary, it continues to inform and delight students of herbalism and plant lore.

Culpeper himself was greatly loved by the people of England, very likely in return for his genuine concern for them The colonist took his herbal with them to the New World both as a medical reference and, because of its astrological commentary, as a guide to when to plant and when to harvest.

"He is arrived at the battlement of an absolute atheist, and by two years' drunken labor hath gallimaufred the apothecaries' book into nonsense, mixing every receipt (recipe) therein with...rebellion or atheism, besides the danger of poisoning man's bodies." Thus did the English medical establishment, in the royalist periodical Mercurius Pragmaticus, greet the publication of A Physical Directory, or a Translation of the London Dispensatory, by Nicholas Culpeper. His mistake was to have translated the Latin pharmacopoeia into everyday language, thus threatening the near monopoly on medical knowledge that the College of Physicians enjoyed. A clergyman's son, Culpeper attended Cambridge University and was well versed in Greek, Latin, and both classical and contemporary medical authors. About 1640 he set up as an apothecary-astrologer-healer in Spitalfields, near London. He fought against the royalists in the English Civil War, suffering a chest wound that may have hastened his early death from consumption. Besides A Physical Directory, Culpeper published the English Physician, which included 369 medicines made of English herbs. He wrote many other works, all of which sold well and angered the medical establishment.