Culpeper
the Reader's Digest had this to say about Culpeper:
Kindly, Controversial Culpeper
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.