Nicholas Culpeper

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.

Culpeper's enduring monument is The English Physitian (1652), later and ever after known as the Complete Herbal. In it he described hundreds of plants, where they grow, how to recognize them, and what ailments they treat, in accessible English aimed at the household rather than the physician's study, so that families could gather and prepare their own remedies from the common plants around them.

What makes the book distinctive, beyond its populism, is its thoroughgoing astrological framework. Culpeper held that every plant, every disease and every part of the body falls under the rulership of a planet, and that healing works by these correspondences, a herb governed by one planet treating an illness governed by its opposite, or strengthening the organ ruled by the same power. This union of herbalism and astrology, drawn from the older doctrine of sympathies and from writers such as the astrologer William Lilly, is the reason his herbal belongs as much to the history of astrology as of botany, and it is why this atlas draws on him among its sources.

The Complete Herbal became one of the most enduring books in the English language, reprinted continuously for more than three centuries and consulted by herbalists to this day, an unusually complete victory for a man who set out to make the specialists' knowledge common property.