Nicholas Culpeper and the Complete Herbal

Nicholas Culpeper, 1616 to 1654, was the London apothecary and astrologer who put the English materia medica into English and into the hands of the people, and whose herbal, published in 1652 as The English Physitian and known since as Culpeper's Complete Herbal, has never been out of print. He is the herbalist for whom every plant is under a planet, every disease under a planet, and every cure a matter of sympathy or antipathy between them; and he is the tradition's radical, who translated the physicians' Latin pharmacopoeia against their will so that a poor person could gather medicine from the hedgerow and know what it was for.

The life

Culpeper was born in Surrey in 1616, the son of a clergyman who died before his birth, and was raised in Sussex by his mother in the house of his grandfather, a Puritan minister. A spell at Cambridge ended without a degree, and he was apprenticed to an apothecary in London, where he learned the trade of preparing and dispensing and, on his own account, astrology and the classical physicians. He married Alice Field in 1640 and with her money set up in Spitalfields, outside the City walls and outside the jurisdiction of the College of Physicians, where he treated the poor for little or nothing and saw, by his own account, a great many patients a day. He fought for Parliament in the Civil War and was wounded in the chest at Newbury in 1643. The wound and consumption together killed him in January 1654, at thirty-seven.

The books

In 1649 he published A Physicall Directory, an English translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the College's official Latin book of remedies, with his own notes on the uses and the planetary rulers of each. The College had kept the book in Latin on purpose, and the translation, reissued as Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, was an act of war against their monopoly; the physicians' press called him a drunkard and a lecher for it. In 1651 came A Directory for Midwives, and Semeiotica Uranica, or an Astrological Judgement of Diseases, which sets out the decumbiture, the chart cast for the moment a person falls ill. In 1652 The English Physitian appeared, an herbal of the plants of the English countryside with their virtues and their planets, written to be cheap; the enlarged edition of 1653 is the text that became the Complete Herbal. After his death his widow and his publishers issued more under his name than he can have written, and the later editions carry a good deal that is not his.

What he held

Culpeper's medicine is Galen's, read through astrology. Every plant has a quality, hot or cold, dry or moist, in one of four degrees, and belongs to one of the seven planets: Rosemary, Rosmarinus officinalis, and St John's Wort, Hypericum perforatum, to the Sun; Comfrey, Symphytum officinale, to Saturn; Nettle, Urtica dioica, and Garlic, Allium sativum, to Mars; Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, and Elder, Sambucus nigra, to Venus; Valerian, Valeriana officinalis, and Lavender, Lavandula angustifolia, to Mercury; the moist and cooling plants of the ponds to the Moon; and the great restoratives to Jupiter. Each part of the body has its planet, and each disease is caused by a planet's affliction of a part. A disease is cured by sympathy, with a plant of the planet that rules the afflicted part, to strengthen it, or by antipathy, with a plant of the planet opposed to the one causing the disease, to oppose it. The herbalist reads the person's chart and the decumbiture, chooses the plant by its planet and its quality, and gathers it, if it can be managed, when its planet is strong.

Beneath the astrology is a practical materia medica. The entries give the plant's appearance, where it grows and when it flowers, its government and virtues, and its preparations, the syrup, the decoction, the distilled water, the ointment. Culpeper favoured simples, single plants used alone, over the compound medicines of the College, and English plants over imported drugs, on the argument that a country's own plants suit its own diseases. He wrote so that a person with no Latin and no money could act.

What survives

The astrological method survives at the edge of practice, as a way of seeing plant and person rather than a rule of prescription: Matthew Wood and Graeme Tobyn, whose Culpeper's Medicine sets the system out for modern use, are the practitioners who take it seriously, and the planetary tags on the plants live on in every herbalist's memory. The plant descriptions and virtues survive more broadly, since the Complete Herbal is where a great many English uses of a great many plants were first written down in the vernacular, and the modern monographs on comfrey, elder, valerian, and yarrow still begin from what he recorded. What has been revised is much of the internal use of the toxic and the pyrrolizidine plants, comfrey among them, and the humoral dosing has given way to the doses of the pharmacopoeias. His stance survives whole: that the knowledge of plants belongs to the people who can gather them, and that the language of medicine is the language they speak. Benjamin Woolley's biography, The Herbalist, is the modern account of the life.