The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom
Benjamin Woolley HarperCollins, 402pp, £16.99
ISBN 0007126573
Culpeper. Hearing this name nowadays, you will think, likely as not, of that nice chain of shops. The ones with the herbs outside, and that air of quiet English witch-doctery. They sell sweet-scented pillows for insomniacs and sandalwood bath salts and a range of spices for mulling and suchlike. While shopping there, I had been vaguely aware that there was a real Nicholas Culpeper, the author of some old book called The Herbal. Misled by the shops - which were actually founded only in 1927 by Mrs Hilda Leyel of the Herbal Society - I envisaged this Culpeper as a weedy milk-and-water type, spending his mornings prancing in a herb garden, his afternoons pampering his cats and his evenings snuggled up with a lavender cushion and a cup of ginger tea. How wrong I was.
The real Culpeper, as Benjamin Woolley's wonderful biography shows, was anything but bland. A chain-smoking, hard-drinking, bawdy-mouthed rebel, Culpeper fought on the side of parliament in the English civil war and died aged just 37, having fathered seven children, as well as a series of bestselling books. Culpeper's interest in the medicinal properties of herbs, far from being a foppish pursuit, put him at the centre of debates about the future of English medicine and democratic politics.
There are very few records of Culpeper's life. All Woolley had to go on was a brief memoir, one letter, a couple of manuscript fragments, several tantalising mentions in official papers, and some pamphlets, not enough for a conventional biography. But Woolley turned this paucity of evidence into a virtue by contrasting the life of Culpeper with that of William Harvey (1578-1657), the rational genius of official English medicine.
Harvey was an archetypal establishment figure. In theory, his discovery of the circulation of blood was revolutionary. But he was careful to make his discovery fit with divine-right monarchy, comparing the role of the heart to the role of the king. Charles I rewarded him with the wardenship of Merton College, Oxford.
By contrast, Nicholas Culpeper despised the complacency of authority in all its forms. He dabbled in astrology, even though he disliked horoscopes, because it was an anti-authoritarian form of medicine. This rebellious attitude was a reaction against his ranting grandfather, the Reverend William Attersoll, who insisted that "evil Magistrates are Magistrates", and so should still be obeyed unquestioningly. Culpeper's medicine was a plea for "the Liberty of the Subject", the ordinary individual, against the obfuscating lies of those in power. In his great work, The English Physitian, Culpeper notes that religion teaches us to put up with being sad and to "wait upon God's providence". What a "fine thing" it would be "if men and women could live so", Culpeper sarcastically observes. But they cannot. "Superfluous Melancholy causeth care, fear, sad-ness, despair, envy and many more evils besides." Therefore, instead of putting faith in religion, the depressed should avail themselves of a simply made concoction of "melancholy thistle" and become "as merry as a cricket".
Culpeper saw that many so-called medical experts were not really interested in making their patients better, merely in parading their own superiority. Woolley quotes a very funny passage where Culpeper satirises the behaviour of the "piss prophets" who used chamber pots for prognostications, imagining a doctor who pretends to be able to tell, from a bottle of urine, exactly how many stairs a patient has fallen down. Culpeper challenged the idea that medical knowledge should be the preserve of the rich and educated. At his apothecary's practice in Threadneedle Street, Culpeper would treat anyone, no matter how poor. Sometimes he saw 40 patients in a morning. His books, which ran to numerous editions, reached many more people, advocating medicines that were "common and cheap and easie to be found".
The Royal College of Physicians, of which Harvey was a prominent member, resented the Society of Apothecaries and accused it of fraud. Indeed, Culpeper is still often dismissed as a quack and "arch-herbalist". But Woolley convincingly argues that, in this pre-Enlightenment world, Culpeper was no more an "arch-herbalist" than the elite doctors, most of whom relied on herbs, too, and, like medical experts throughout history, were sometimes lacking in common sense. Harvey, for example, believed that women experienced sexual pleasure through the umbilical cord, which does not speak very well of his powers of experimentation.
Culpeper's voice speaks to us across the centuries, championing the cause of the patient against money-grubbing pharmacists and status-grubbing doctors. As he says in a typically stirring entry on wormwood, "The grave equals all men."
Bee Wilson's The Hive: the story of the honeybees and us will be published by John Murray in September
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