Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) was an English physician, herbalist and astrologer whose brief and combative life was devoted to a single radical purpose: taking medical knowledge out of the hands of a closed profession and putting it, in plain English, into the hands of ordinary people.
Apprenticed to apothecaries rather than trained at the universities, and never a licensed member of the London College of Physicians, Culpeper set up practice in Spitalfields, on the poorer edge of London, and is said to have treated great numbers of the sick without charge. In 1649, to the fury of the College, he published A Physicall Directory, an unauthorized English translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the College's Latin catalogue of medicines, previously the guild's guarded property. By translating it he broke the profession's monopoly on the knowledge of what remedies were and how they were made.
A committed Parliamentarian in the English Civil War, wounded in the chest at the battle of Newbury, he was a religious and political radical as much as a medical one, and his enemies attacked him as an atheist and a subversive. He worked at great speed, in poor health, and died of tuberculosis at only thirty-eight.