Dr Culpepper's Herbal

I recently purchased this old edition of the famous herbal. The original version was published in 1653. This one dates from 1850.

Nicholas Culpepper was an extraordinary man who even today might be regarded as health radical. His father died before his birth and he was reared by his mother at her father's home. From an early age Nicholas raided his maternal grandfather's library for books on astrology and anatomy while from his grandmother he learned plant lore.

He was sent to Cambridge to train for the ministry but rebelled against theology, attended medical lectures instead, played sport, partied and took up smoking tobacco. He never graduated and left in disgrace. He had already fallen in love with the daughter of rich neighbours but her parents forbade their marriage. They plotted to elope but she was killed when her carriage was struck by lightning en route for Europe.

The bereavement left Nicholas severely depressed. He was disinherited and his mother died as well. Nevertheless he went to London and apprenticed himself to an apothecary, and while there became a student of the great astrologer William Lilly from whom he learnt the specialism of decumbiture: the exact astrological charting of the stages of an illness.

He set himself up in east London as a herbalist and a physician, and met his future wife when treating her father for gout. He made his services available to the poor, seeing up to 40 patients a day but charging little or nothing. He seems to have acted as a counsellor as much as a physician, noting that "our greatest skill lies in the infusion of hopes, to induce confidence and peace of mind."

All this was in complete contradiction to the medical establishment of the day who railed against his unorthodox practices. They were even more incensed by Culpepper's decision to translate, and demystify, their main source book, the Latin Pharmacopoeia, so that "so that all my fellow countrymen and apothecaries can understand what the doctors write on their bills. Hitherto they made medicine a secret conspiracy, writing prescriptions in mysterious Latin to hide ignorance and to impress upon the patient." He was critical of their crude prescribing habits: "It is surprising that they are so popular and that some patients recover. My own poor patients would not endure this taxing and costly treatment. The victims of physicians only survive since they are from the rich and robust stock."

Culpepper also wrote a treatise about midwifery and childcare, urging women to pay attention to basic rules of hygiene as " a little knowledge about cleanliness and care can do more good than many costly potions from the apothecary".

As well as a health reformer Culpepper was also a political radical who fought for Cromwell against the Royalists during the Civil War, and treated wounded soldiers with herbs he collected on the battlefield. He was himself wounded in the shoulder at Edgehill in 1642 and this eventually led to his early death at the edge of 38.

Here, I have collected a few of the plants that would have been in Culpepper's dispensary in various forms. The yellow one is Agrimony (Agrimonia eupatria) which he prescribes for gout, for liver complaints and for "healing all inward wounds, bruises, hurts and distempers", also snakebites. On the right is Betony (Stachys officinalis), a crucially important medication, since Roman times, for a wide range of ailments, especially female complaints, and one that Culpepper recommends be kept in every house "in syrup, conserve, oil, ointment and plaister." On the left is Woundwort (Stachys sylvatica), a remedy for recent injuries.

It was a wet day today but a short walk enabled me to gather these plants within a mile of my house. They are none of them remarkable flowers and could be easily overlooked among the more eye-catching species, but once there would have many healers, women especially, who would have possessed the ability to recognise them and to use them as readily as we might use medications from the chemist (most of which were originally derived from such natural sources). It was Nicholas Culpepper who was largely responsible for making this knowledge so widely accessible to the common people.