Their historical review includes the comments of Nicholas Culpeper (October 18, 1616) to January 10, 1654). The date Culpeper actually wrote his comments in the margins is not clear. The article reads:
In the official list of the materia medics the animal kingdom was largely represented, and many of the remedies of the preceding century were retained; for we find that Nicholas Culpepper, gentleman student in physic and astrology, as he styles himself, thus ridicules some of the contents of the materia medica, inserting his own comments in parenthesis.
The list runs thus ...The fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose, eel, bear, heron, thymallos (if you know where to get it, adds Mr. Culpeper), dog, capon, beaver, wild cat, stork, hedgehog, hen, man, lion, hare, kite or jack (if they have any fat, says Mr. Culpeper, I am persuaded it is worth twelve pence per grain), wolf, mouse of the mountain (if you can catch them), pardal, hog, serpent, bear, fox, vulture (if you can catch them); east or west benzoar; viper’s flesh, the brains of hares and sparrows, the rennet of a lamb, kid, hare, calf, and horse—and here Mr. Culpeper very quaintly remarks that the physicians should have...[used] the rennet of an ass to make medicine for their [own] addled brains....
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Nicholas Culpeper as a "physician and astrologer." We quote liberally from their article because Culpeper is a type of new intellectual much more common now -- he is ready to assert his individual judgment against any authority; his having thought something, is sufficient warrant for that thought.
Culpeper's education at Cambridge was interrupted by
..... a personal tragedy .... He and a wealthy, well-born, and apparently beautiful young woman from Sussex had fallen in love and intended to elope; but on her way to their meeting place, she was struck dead by lightning. Culpeper was naturally distraught, and left Cambridge....
[In 1640 Culpeper inherited from his grandfather a small amount] ....Having been unable to persuade Culpeper to follow him into the [Puritan] ministry, William Attersole left him a derisory legacy of 40s. Culpeper apparently remarked that 'he had courted two mistresses that had cost him very dear'....Those two mistresses were physic and astrology....[Physic then included apothecary expertise.]
.... Apothecaries at this time,[1640s] as well as dispensing remedies, frequently diagnosed illnesses and prescribed; these activities brought them into constant conflict with the College of Physicians, which was anxious to protect its statutory monopoly of internal medicine in and within 7 miles of London. The expense of consulting a licensed physician meant, however, that there was a constant demand not only for apothecaries (who were slightly cheaper), but for unknown numbers of quacks, empirics, 'wise women', herbalists, and midwives, whose services, provided they were given free of charge, were recognized and protected by the so-called 'quacks' charter' of 1542.
Any resolution of these conflicts between the physicians and the apothecaries was hampered by the political and social chaos of the 1640s. This is not to say that the issues disappeared, as was shown on 17 December 1642, when Culpeper was apparently tried for witchcraft; he was acquitted. ....During...[1643] Culpeper fought on the side of parliament in the civil war. He received a serious chest wound from a musket ball, which probably hastened his death....
By now Culpeper's political, religious, and social values were well formed; and even by the standards of his day, they were radical. As an ardent republican, he hailed the death of Charles I, seeing it as a portent of the millenarian rule by Christ on earth; and he took the risk of remarking in print of Cromwell's ascendancy that the people had merely 'leapt out the frying pan into the fire' ....Culpeper was equally antinomian, denouncing 'the monster called Religion' .... and testifying that 'All the religion I know is Jesus Christ and him crucified, and the indwelling of the spirit of God in me'....Culpeper committed himself wholeheartedly to the service of the sick among the poor, powerless, and uneducated....
Some time in 1644 Culpeper established his own practice at his home in Spitalfields, where he remained for the rest of his life. By now he had a considerable number of clients. Culpeper's most significant service, however, on which he worked the hardest and for which he is best remembered, was writing and translating books, enabling the poor to help themselves. As he pledged in 1650, 'My pen (if God permit me life and health) shall never lie still, till I have given them the whole model of Physick in the native language'
One of the ways in which the College of Physicians maintained its monopoly was through the Pharmacopoeia, commonly known as the 'London dispensatory'. This was entirely in Latin-difficult even for some apothecaries, and impossible for the barely literate. Culpeper's first project was therefore to take advantage of the collapse of censorship and translate the Pharmacopoeia into English. It appeared, entitled A Physicall Directory, or, A Translation of the London Dispensatory, in 1649. Culpeper also supplied definitions of terms, added information on what the recipes were to be used for, and provided instructions on how to make the medicines where the Pharmacopoeia's own were too short or unclear. These additions were meant to break the monopoly held by the apothecaries as well as that of the physicians.
This was no disinterested or neutral act, as the royalist newsheet Mercurius Pragmaticus for 4-9 September of that year immediately recognized, accusing Culpeper of 'mixing every receipt therein with some scruples, at least, of rebellion or atheisme', and of endeavouring 'to bring into obloquy the famous societies of apothecaries and chyrurgeons'. William Johnson, the college's chemist, asked whether the result was 'fit to wipe ones breeches withall'....The next two editions, of 1650 and 1651, included a 'Key to Galen and Hippocrates, their method of physick', while Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or, A London Dispensatory (1653), his translation of the college's new edition of the Pharmacopoeia, had appended 'An astrologo-physical discourse', thus becoming a more complete handbook of medical self-help. In these editions Culpeper continued to criticize the self-interest of the college physicians, whom he had already classed with priests and lawyers: 'The one deceives men in matters belonging to their soul, the other in matters belonging to their bodies, and the third in matter belonging to their estates' (N. Culpeper A Physicall Directory, 1649, 'To the reader'). But he also warned the reader that physic was indeed a serious and difficult matter.
But Culpeper's magnum opus was The English Physician, or, An astrologo-physical discourse on the vulgar herbs of this nation, being a compleat method of physick, whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, being sick (1652). Costing 3d., it provided a comprehensive list of native medicinal herbs, indexed to a list of typical illnesses, using an astrological, rather than Galenic, approach (of the kind still flourishing in popular British culture), and set out in a straightforward and frank style. It sold widely at the time, and there have been over one hundred subsequent editions, including fifteen before 1700. (One edition of 1708 was printed in Boston, Massachusetts; it and the translated Pharmacopoeia, printed in 1720, were the first medical books published in North America.)
... He died of consumption-aggravated by excessive tobacco smoking, and very possibly his war wound-on 10 January 1654, at home in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, London, aged only thirty-eight...
His thinking may be ahead and behind the times. Nicholas Culpeper wrote:
'If you do but consider the whole universe as one united body', he wrote,and man an epitome of this body, it will seem strange to none but madmen and fools that the stars should have influence upon the body of man, considering he, be[ing] an epitome of Creation, must needs have a celestial world within himself. (Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, 1654...)
Old ideas still perhaps valid today.
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