Nicholas Culpeper

Translated the physicians' Latin pharmacopoeia into English so the poor could treat themselves, was called a traitor for it, and died at thirty-eight.

Who they were

Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654) was an English apothecary, herbalist and astrologer whose English Physitian (1652) — reprinted ever since as Culpeper's Complete Herbal — is the most widely circulated herbal in the English language and has never been out of print.

His significance is as much political as botanical. Culpeper's project was to take medical knowledge out of Latin and out of the hands of the licensed physicians who charged for it, and put it in English at a price ordinary people could pay.

Where they came from

He was born in Surrey; his father, a clergyman, died shortly before his birth. He was sent to Cambridge to prepare for the church, and by his own account spent his time on medicine and astrology instead. He eloped, and the young woman was reportedly killed by lightning on her way to meet him — an account that comes largely from later biography and should be treated with the caution that such stories deserve.

He was apprenticed to apothecaries in London and set up practice in Spitalfields, outside the City and therefore outside the tightest reach of the College of Physicians. He treated large numbers of poor patients and by contemporary account charged little or nothing.

He fought for Parliament in the Civil War and was badly wounded in the chest at Newbury in 1643. He never fully recovered, and died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight.

What they taught

Medicine in English. In 1649 he published A Physicall Directory, an unauthorised English translation of the College of Physicians' Latin Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. The College was enraged — the translation broke their monopoly on the knowledge their fees depended on — and a royalist pamphlet accused him, in effect, of medical sedition. He followed it with the herbal, written for people who could not afford a physician, and full of instructions on gathering plants growing free in English hedgerows rather than buying imported ingredients.

Astrological botany. Culpeper assigned every plant a ruling planet, and prescribed by opposition and sympathy: a disease under Mars might be treated by a herb of Venus, or by a herb of Mars in a like-cures-like reading. This was not a quirk. It was his organising theory, and it sits alongside the doctrine of signatures as the framework the whole herbal is built on.

Plain speech, freely given. The prose is blunt, funny and frequently rude about physicians, which is a substantial part of why it lasted.

What we can and cannot say

We can say his political achievement was real and consequential. Making medical knowledge available in the vernacular at low cost genuinely shifted power, and the College's fury is the best evidence of how much.

We can say his plant descriptions and preparations preserve a large body of seventeenth-century folk practice that would otherwise have been lost, and are used by historians for exactly that.

We can say the theory is wrong. Planetary rulership does not determine pharmacological activity, and the correspondences are not consistent between authorities — Culpeper's assignments differ from other astrological herbalists', which is what you would expect of a system generated rather than discovered.

We should say plainly that the herbal is a historical document and not a manual, however it is marketed. It contains plants now known to be toxic, doses that are not doses in any modern sense, and confident recommendations for conditions that require actual treatment. It is still sold in cheerful modern editions in the wellness aisle, frequently without any indication that it is nearly four hundred years old and predates any understanding of what its plants contain. Reading it as instruction is a genuine hazard, and the risks in traditional herbalism apply to it in full.

We cannot say what he would make of that. What can be said is that a man who spent his short life trying to get accurate information to people who had none would probably not have wanted his four-hundred-year-old guesses sold to them as current advice.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading