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| Nicholas Culpeper, 1616 - 1654: |
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54) is a legendary figure in the field of herbal medicine. A contemporary of William Harvey he is popularly regarded as the figurehead of alternative medicine, yet most historians of medicine simply refer to him as an uncritical quack and star-gazer. Likely, his most productive contribution to public medicine was to translate the contemporary cures of his time from Latin into common English, so that ordinary people could apply them in their lives. (later reprinted by Nicholas Boone, in Boston)For this, the medical establishment called him a quack, and published many papers to his faults. A member of an old noble family he was born fatherless in Surrey, squandered a fortune in Cambridge, and tried to elope with a rich heiress who was killed by lightning. He trained as an apothecary in London, and by producing an unauthorized critical translation of the London Dispensatory he became the enemy of the physicians. In the Civil War he joined the Parliamentarian forces and was wounded. He fought a duel and was accused of witchcraft. In 1652 he wrote his famous herbal, The English Physician and before that the first English textbook on midwifery and childcare, The English Midwife. In this first modern biography Culpeper emerges as one of the most significant physicians of the English speaking countries in the 17th century. |
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