The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper And The Fight For Medical Freedom 0007126573

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In the mid-seventeenth century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war which saw levels of slaughter not matched until the Somme; famine in a succession of failed harvests

that reduced peasants to ‘anatomies’; epidemics to rival the Black Death; and infant mortality rates that left the mothers of eight or nine children childless. In the midst of these terrible times came Nicholas Culpeper’s Herbal — one of the most popular and enduring books ever published. Culpeper was a virtual outcast from birth. Rebelling against a tyrannical grandfather and the prospect of a life in the church, he abandoned his university education after a doomed attempt at elopement. Disinherited, he went to London, Milton’s ‘city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty’.

There he was

to find his vocation as a herbalist — and a revolutionary. London’s medical regime was then in the grip of the College of Physicians, a powerful body personified in the ‘immortal’ William Harvey, anatomust, royal physician and discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Working in the underground world of religious sects, secret printing presses and unlicensed apothecary shops, Culpeper challenged this stronghold at the time it was reaching the very pinnacle of its power — and in the process became part of the revolution that toppled a monarchy. In a spellbinding narrative of impulse, romance

and

heroism, Benjamin Woolley vividly recreates these momentous struggles and the roots of today’s hopes and fears about the power of medical science, professional institutions and government. The Herbalist tells the story of amedical rebel who took on the authorities and paid the price.

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ation? Or what would be more useful than blood to nourish it?” Like nutritive blood in the veins, the bright red blood vitalized by

the heart ebbs and flows through the pulsing arteries, like tidal water through rivers and streams, irrigating the body. The brain produces the animal virtue, which is distributed through the body via the nerves, producing feeling and movement. In addition to these three virtues, the male body also produces procreative spirit in the testicles that is distributed as sperm through the “spermatic vessels’ to the woman’s womb (whether the ovaries produced procreative material in a similar manner was to remain a matter of

controversy for centuries to come)."°

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Galen was very pleased with this theory, and considered it definitive.

The Herbalist

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