Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54)
Culpeper was an English botanist, apothecary and herbalist. He developed an early interest in medicinal herbs under the influence of his grandmother, spending his spare time cataloguing plants.
He studied at Cambridge, and in 1640 set up a pharmacy at the Halfway House in Spitalfields, obtaining his herbal medicines from the nearby countryside. He was very busy and treated many patients every day, providing his services free of charge for those who couldn’t afford it. He opposed the overpriced practices of physicians of his day and the monopoly exerted by the College of Physicians, believing that medicine should be available to all. As a result, he acquired many enemies, became alienated and was accused of witchcraft.During the Civil War, he was on the side of the Parliamentarians and served as a battlefield medic. After being seriously wounded (in 1643) he returned to London, and in 1652 published The English Physitian, a book of herbal remedies written in the vernacular, subsequently renamed the Complete Herbal. It was priced cheaply to make it accessible to the masses and listed several hundred herbs. The herbal makes great reading – there is plenty of earthy humour, mocking the establishment: ‘Our physicians must imitate like apes, though they cannot come off half so cleverly.’48 For each herb he lists the name and alternatives, brief description, place, time, followed by government and virtues. Most of the species are those which would be found in Britain, with a smattering of exotics. The book uses astrology as one of the guiding principles (and so loses modern credibility), but Culpeper’s ultimate aim was to break away from tradition and make cheap herbal remedies available to all. This about Gerard (from his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ preface):
neither Gerrard nor Parkinson, or any that ever wrote in the like nature, ever gave one wise reason for what they wrote, and so did nothing else but train up young novices in Physic in the School of tradition, and teach them just as a parrot is taught to speak …
The book was a huge success and has not been out of print since the seventeenth century.