Happy Culpepermas: Nicholas Culpeper, Patron Saint of Modern Herbalists
Today, Oct. 18, is Nicholas Culpeper's birthday!
In honor of this special day, I'd like to provide a few links and info on one of my herbal heroes, Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th-century, pre-Restoration herbalist who strove to bring the power of botanical medicines back into the hands of lay people.
The patron saint attribution is my own; in a striking parallel to our own era, Culpeper faced a megalomaniacal, money-hungry medical/pharmaceutical establishment which sought to control the treatment of ailments large and small and denounced anything else (particularly folk herbal healing) as quackery or witchcraft. In fact, Culpeper himself spent time in prison under the latter charge.
At the heart of Culpeper's career was his conviction that medicine was not a commercial monopoly and secret meant only for doctors, but a birthright of the people. He had good reason to declare that "no man deserved to starve to pay an insulting, insolent physician" -- unlike other apothecaries of the time, he was Cambridge-educated and, when only an apprentice, decided to translate the (Royal) College of Physicians' Pharmacopoeia Londonensis for the benefit of the Society of Apothecaries and the lay public. (The College published the book in Latin so that it could only be read by the educated -- that is, a tiny minority of 17th-century England.) Culpeper found it to contain nebulous, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes dangerous or impossible recipes of herbs and other substances that could either not be identified or could only be obtained by the extravagantly rich. He published this translation with his own commentary, and this act put him squarely in the midst of a years-long political battle between apothecaries and doctors.
Culpeper spent most of his life cataloging and researching herbs of the English isles. He maintained that plants grow near the people meant to consume them as medicines, and employed astrological principles to his categorization of the herbs' energy and actions (in other words, an herb described in traditional Chinese medicine as hot and blood-vitalizing might be attributed to Mars, or a warming harmonizing herb might be the Sun in Leo, herbs that drain dampness of the lower jiao attributed to Venus, etc.). I certainly agree with this concept of eating/healing with locally-grown plants, but I wonder how Culpeper would feel about planetary herbalism now that exotic plants are easier to acquire and grow at home. He was a product of his time, and I imagine he'd find the notion of planetary herbalism quite agreeable if he were alive now.
He maintained a well-known clinic in Spitalfields, so named for the hospitals and asylums situated in the poor East End of London. He saw dozens of patients per day and didn't turn away those who could not pay. Because he used medicines made from locally grown herbs, his treatments and formulas were infinitely more affordable for common folk than the expensive potions that the College of Physicians declared were the only legal medicines.
Culpeper's famous "The English Physitian" concentrates on English herbs, including botanical descriptions, where to find them, energetic/astrological attribution, recipes for medicines, and of course, indications. It's written in a matter-of-fact, conversational tone meant for lay people, and he doesn't resist the urge to sometimes throw in a bit of snarky, humorous editorializing (usually at the expense of doctors). "The English Physitian" has been in continuous print since it was first put to paper in 1652. (Beware new titles published posthumously by his wife; she really tried to make a lot of money on his popular and trusted name. There are a number of fakes out there, some including alchemical formulas neither created nor endorsed by Culpeper himself.) Culpeper died at the young age of 38 from tuberculosis aggravated by a chest wound sustained when he fought in the English Civil War.
As now, there were certainly many righteous doctors practicing during Culpeper's time (like William Harvey), but his actions called attention to the corruption and dangerous practices running rife in the powerful College of Physicians, and in the long run restored better balance to the healing arts at home and within the medical establishment.
And now, in honor of the Feast of St. Nick, those links I promised:
The English Physitian (1652)- Culpeper's materia medica and magnum opus online. This pharmacopoeia provided the kind of organization upon which later herbals and dispensatories would be based.
Get a copy of The English Physician
Nicholas Culpeper on Wikipedia (however, the bit at the end about Aurum Potabile attributed to Culpeper is probably inaccurate)
Sadly, there is very little biographical information left to us from Culpeper himself or from his friends and family, and certainly he has been alternately demonized and deified throughout history. Benjamin Woolley's book, Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to the People
wowza! This guy sounds like a hero!!
Maybe you should update his wiki entry...thanks for this great post.
Posted by: stu | October 18, 2007 at 03:30 PM
Excellent post babe!
And thanks for the info. As usual, will earn you a link from my all-Hebrew-blog (surprises will come the red way....).
Love you always,
red ima. :)
Posted by: Yael Ernst | October 19, 2007 at 12:16 PM