Culpeper's Complete Herbal

What it is

The English Physitian, published in 1652 and expanded the following year as The English Physitian Enlarged, is a catalogue of several hundred plants growing in England, with descriptions, locations, flowering times, planetary rulerships and medicinal uses. It has been continuously reprinted for nearly four centuries, usually under the later title Culpeper's Complete Herbal.

Its distinguishing features were deliberate and political: it was written in English rather than Latin, priced at threepence so that ordinary people could afford it, and concerned almost entirely with plants growing free in English hedgerows rather than expensive imported ingredients.

Where it came from

Its author's story is told under Nicholas Culpeper. The book is the culmination of a campaign: in 1649 he had already published an unauthorised English translation of the College of Physicians' Latin Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, breaking the professional monopoly on the knowledge that justified physicians' fees. The College was furious, and a royalist pamphlet attacked him in terms that made the political stakes explicit.

The herbal followed, aimed squarely at people who could not afford a physician and did not intend to consult one.

How it is read

Each entry follows a fixed structure — Description, Place, Time, and then Government and Virtues, which gives the ruling planet and the uses. That last heading is the key to the whole book: Culpeper's system is astrological, assigning each plant to a planet and prescribing by sympathy or opposition. A disease of Mars might be met with a herb of Venus, or with a herb of Mars on a like-cures-like principle.

Historians read it as a primary source for seventeenth-century folk practice, plant distribution, vernacular plant names and popular medical belief — a rich record of what ordinary English people did about illness before there was much anyone could do.

The prose is a large part of its survival. It is direct, funny, and frequently contemptuous of physicians, and it reads like a man talking rather than a reference work.

What we can and cannot say

We can say it is historically important, both as a document of practice and as an act of politics. Making medical knowledge available cheaply in the vernacular genuinely redistributed something, and the College's reaction is the proof.

We can say the theory is wrong. Planetary rulership does not determine what a plant does, and Culpeper's assignments do not agree with those of other astrological herbalists — the mark of a system generated rather than observed. The doctrine of signatures runs through it for the same reason.

We can say some entries describe genuinely active plants, because a tradition accumulated over centuries by people paying attention will contain real observations alongside the theory. That does not make the theory a method for finding them.

And the necessary warning, because this book is unusual in still being sold as though it were current. Cheerful modern editions appear in wellness sections and gift shops, frequently with no indication that the text is from 1653. It contains plants now known to be toxic, preparations described in terms that are not doses in any modern sense, and confident recommendations for conditions that require actual medical treatment — including for pregnancy, where several of its recommended herbs are abortifacient or teratogenic. Everything in traditional herbalism about interactions, identification and dose applies here in full, with the additional problem that this particular source predates any knowledge of what its plants contain.

We cannot say what Culpeper would think of that. The one thing his career makes clear is that he wanted people to have accurate information, which makes selling his guesses to them as current advice a peculiar way to honour him.

Further reading

• The 1653 text — freely available online, and worth reading a few entries of for the voice alone.
• Benjamin Woolley, The Herbalist (2004) — for the politics of its publication.