Nicholas Culpeper

Nicholas Culpeper (1616—1654) was an English herbalist and translator who made medical knowledge available in English to people who could not afford physicians or read Latin. His English Physitian (1652) has been called one of the most popular and enduring books in publishing history, with editions still being issued into the twenty-first century. Culpeper combined political radicalism with medical democratization, attacking the College of Physicians’ monopoly on medical knowledge as a moral failing. He organized his practice and his herbal around a system of planetary signatures that modern readers tend to ignore, and which was central to how he understood medicine. Modern scholarship has revealed that much of his most famous work was directly borrowed from John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, complicating his reputation for originality without erasing the significance of what he achieved.

The Medical Radical

Culpeper was born in 1619 and raised in the Puritan household of his grandfather William Attersoll, a rector with a keen interest in study. After studying at Cambridge and beginning an apothecary apprenticeship, he set up as an unlicensed apothecary in 1640 in Spitalfields with his partner Leadbetter.(Stapley, 2024) Culpeper married Alice Fields in 1640, whose dowry funded their home and his practice, enabling him to treat the poor at no charge in Spitalfields (Stapley, 2012). He translated the College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia into English in 1649, a move that provoked intense criticism from the Royal College of Physicians (Stapley, 2012). By rendering it accessible, Culpeper struck at the foundation of medical monopoly (Wear, 2000). He also aimed the translation at apothecaries themselves, many of whom had shaky Latin yet depended on the Pharmacopoeia for their livelihoods, adding critical commentary (Griggs, 1981). The College’s fury at what amounted to an unauthorized publication showed in the fierce criticism that followed (Stapley, 2012).

His radicalism was not merely professional. Wear describes Culpeper as combining political radicalism with medical democratization, attacking the learned physicians’ refusal to treat the poor and linking medical monopoly with moral failure. He framed access to medical knowledge as a matter of Christian charity, arguing that physicians who hoarded knowledge while the poor suffered were violating their duty (Wear, 2000). Porter characterizes the translation of the Pharmacopoeia similarly: in Culpeper’s view the College’s monopoly was unchristian because it drove up the costs of medical treatment beyond what poor patients could pay (Porter, 1997).

The period of partnership did not last. Culpeper was accused of witchcraft by a patient who had wasted away under his care and was tried in December; he was acquitted. When he returned from the Battle of Newbury, wounded in the shoulder, the Society of Apothecaries had already warned Leadbetter to cut ties with him, which Leadbetter finally did in 1643.(Stapley, 2024)

One charge Culpeper did not press was an attack on Galen himself. Temkin notes that although Culpeper praises Paracelsus as a man “whose name shall ever be dear to posterity,” he almost exclusively prescribes Galenicals. His quarrel was not doctrinal but social: those who keep medical knowledge “in a foreign tongue” do so because “it toucheth their coppy-hold.” His target was the College’s Latin monopoly, not Galenic medicine as such (Temkin, 1973). French similarly notes that even the “violently neoteric” Culpeper felt no need to justify his 1652 translation of Galen’s Tegni (French, 2003).

The English Physitian completed this democratizing project. Francia and Stobart note that when Culpeper reversed the trend toward ever larger and more expensive herbals by declaring that only English herbs were needed for English ailments, he could do so partly because botanical identification had advanced to the point where English plants could be identified accurately (Francia, 2014). The book’s enduring popularity has been described as perhaps the non-religious book in English to remain longest in continuous print (Francia, 2014). By 1979 it had gone through at least forty-one different editions, with an expensive facsimile issue appearing that year (Griggs, 1981).

Astrological Medicine

Culpeper’s medical system was built on a foundation of astrological theory that many later readers have simply discarded. Keith Thomas, the social historian of magic and popular belief, placed Culpeper within the mainstream of seventeenth-century astrological practice rather than on its fringes. Thomas documented that Culpeper, who practised approximately 1640 to 1654, is reported to have averaged forty clients in a morning; at that rate his annual caseload would have exceeded ten thousand consultations, making him one of the most prolific practitioners in the country (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

Astrology at this scale was not a marginal pursuit. The types of questions posed to astrologers covered health, lost property, marriage prospects, business ventures, and political fortunes. Medical and health questions formed a major category, with practitioners functioning as an accessible alternative to physicians across the social spectrum (Thomas, Keith, 1971). William Lilly’s casebooks from 1654 to 1656 show clients ranging from gentry and professionals through tradespeople, seafarers, military personnel, and domestic servants (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

Culpeper’s method rested on a four-step diagnostic sequence: the physician identified the planet causing the disease, determined the body part affected, identified the planet governing that part, and then chose herbs of either opposing or sympathetic planetary nature to guide treatment. He maintained that disease always varied according to the motions of the stars and that this variation was itself sufficient evidence of where the cause resided.(Stapley, 2024) This was not an idiosyncratic system but one with deep antecedents. Medical astrology linking zodiac signs to organs of the body had been used by university-trained physicians from at least the fourteenth century, drawing on Arabic sources — particularly the Introductorium in Astronomiam of Abu Ma’shar, whose ninth-century elaboration of the connections between the twelve signs and body parts had reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century and added philosophical credibility to the entire framework.(Stapley, 2024)

The distinction between sympathetic and antipathic cures was clinically significant. Culpeper used herbs of the planet governing the diseased organ for sympathy (adding strength to the organ so the body could fight the disease naturally, following Hippocrates), but reserved antipathic treatment — herbs of the opposing planet — for acute situations, where the approach was more powerful but also potentially damaging.(Stapley, 2024) Saturn herbs in his system were cold and moist, including mullein, comfrey, heartsease, Solomon’s seal, henbane, and fumitory; Mercury herbs corresponded to Gemini and Virgo (governing shoulders and stomach), and included caraway, fennel, and elecampane — hot and moist in character.(Stapley, 2024)

The system worked through sympathy and antipathy: herbs ruled by the same planet as the disease could cure by sympathy; herbs ruled by the opposing planet could cure by antipathy (Stapley, 2012). He assigned specific herbs to each planetary ruler: Sun herbs included angelica, greater celandine, chamomile, eyebright, juniper, rosemary, and rue; Moon herbs included chickweed, cleavers, wild lettuce, opium poppy, water lily, and willow; Mars governed nettle, hawthorn, blessed thistle, and basil (Stapley, 2012).

This was not astrology as an add-on to herbal medicine but as its theoretical foundation (Thomas, Keith, 1971). Nicholas Culpeper’s astrological physick brought planetary signatures, humoral medicine, and plant sympathies together into a coherent popular system, presenting astrology not as a rival to medicine but as its necessary organizing framework (Thomas, Keith, 1971). Protestant theologians of the period condemned judicial astrology as a usurpation of divine providence while tolerating astrological medicine and weather prediction (Thomas, Keith, 1971). The critique was ethical and theological rather than empirical, leaving the medical framework of astrology largely intact (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

The irony of Culpeper’s legacy is that although astrological medicine meant everything to him, it is not the reason for his fame. Stapley observes that his Complete Herbal became famous largely without it: few readers have used the herbal alongside his Astrological Judgement of Diseases, as he explicitly instructed them to do (Stapley, 2012).

The Parkinson Problem

Modern textual analysis has substantially complicated Culpeper’s reputation for originality. The continental tradition he inherited was itself dominated by a handful of authoritative texts: Mattioli’s translation and commentary on Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica had become the most widely read scientific text published in the sixteenth century (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011), setting a standard for encyclopaedic herbal coverage that shaped everything that followed, including the English herbalists Culpeper ultimately relied on. Jill Francis’s chapter on John Parkinson for Francia and Stobart establishes the scale of what Culpeper drew on: Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640) was probably the most detailed and accurate medicinal herbal ever printed in English, comprising over 1,700 pages and used as a standard medical text for well over a century after Parkinson’s death in 1650 (Francia, 2014). It was also the principal source for the English Physitian.

Francia and Stobart’s detailed comparison of the English Physitian with the Theatrum Botanicum reveals that the majority of Culpeper’s herbal entries were directly obtained from Parkinson’s work (Francia, 2014). This borrowing was recognized at the time: at least one seventeenth-century reader wrote on the title page of a pirated edition, “This booke was collected out of Parkinson’s herball” (Francia, 2014).

The evidence is quantitative. Of 105 entries examined, two-thirds follow a pattern where Culpeper’s physical descriptions and lists of actions replicate Parkinson’s entries in the same sequence (Francia, 2014). Culpeper systematically excised Parkinson’s references to classical authorities, Dioscorides, Pliny, and Galen, and credited them in a list at the front of the book, obscuring that they were merely names removed from Parkinson’s entries (Francia, 2014).

This does not make the English Physitian worthless. Culpeper added astrological correspondences, simplified the language, organized the material for a lay audience, and, most importantly, made it affordable and available. But the claim that the work represents an independent synthesis of the herbal tradition requires substantial qualification.

Culpeper and Vernacular Medicine

Wear notes that the vast majority of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical books published in England were written in English, not Latin, creating a spectrum from popular remedy books to theoretically grounded textbooks (Wear, 2000).

The third wave of English-language midwifery manuals, for instance, was initiated by Culpeper as he set out to make medical knowledge cheaply available to the general public (Francia, 2014). His Directory for Midwives was partly motivated by the loss of four of his six children and championed female midwives against medical authority (Stapley, 2012). The text was thorough in scope, covering everything from desire for copulation and signs of conception through to weaning the child, and it explicitly directed female midwives to consult his work rather than attend the College of Physicians for instruction — in the same spirit as his translation of the Pharmacopoeia.(Stapley, 2024) These publications were themselves translations and recombinations of continental European sources, making them evidence of French, German, or Swiss practice rather than necessarily original English herbal medicine (Francia, 2014).

Culpeper also drew on Helmontian ideas, positioning himself within the chemical philosophy that offered the strongest mid-seventeenth-century alternative to Galenic therapeutics (Wear, 2000). His medical radicalism was not merely populist but intellectually aligned with the reforming currents that challenged the Galenic establishment from multiple directions simultaneously.

The context of Culpeper’s argument about local herbs deserves attention. He asked his readers whether it would not make “both a man’s ears glow to hear a man affirm that God hath created no remedy for such a disease nearer than the East Indies,” and wondered why the College, when it did turn to English herbs, listed neither their English names nor their virtues, as though knowing what herbs in one’s garden were good for would harm an English patient (Griggs, 1981). Haller places this argument within a longer tradition: the claim that every geographic region produces plants suited to its own diseases traces back to Paracelsus, and the idea was reinforced by reports from native American botanical practice (Haller, 1994). Sydenham’s later hostility to domestic herbal practice, grumbling that “every house has its old woman, or practitioner, skilled in an art she has never learned, to the killing of mankind,” can be read as a response to the popular culture that Culpeper helped sustain (Griggs, 1981).

The English Physician and Its Legacy

Denham’s systematic analysis of the nineteenth-century herbalist John Skelton’s published work found that of the 135 Eurasian herbs in Skelton’s three main publications, 104 were included in Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, though Skelton typically did not cite Culpeper by name (Denham, 2013). Culpeper was, as Denham notes, the underlying source for authors writing on British herbs, “then as now” (Denham, 2013).

This pattern of silent reliance is not unique to Skelton. The Complete Herbal functioned less as a text to be consciously cited than as an infrastructure that later British herbalists absorbed without always acknowledging. That Culpeper himself drew heavily on Parkinson adds a further layer: the tradition Skelton inherited was itself a transformation of Parkinson’s more demanding original into a form accessible to readers without classical learning.

Nicholas Culpeper, in The English Physician-Enlarged (1703), enunciated the theory that every geographic area produced plants whose medicinal properties were capable of curing diseases indigenous to the region, a belief dating back to Paracelsus and reinforced by knowledge from native American tribes (Haller, 1994).

Scholarly Assessment

Three different scholarly traditions have produced different assessments of Culpeper, and the differences are not merely stylistic. They reflect genuinely divergent questions.

Francia and Stobart approach Culpeper as textual critics. Their primary concern is with what the English Physitian actually is as a document: what proportion of it Culpeper wrote, where it came from, and how it compares with its sources. Their findings are damaging to hagiographic accounts. When measured against Parkinson’s Theatrum, the English Physitian is substantially derivative, and the method by which Culpeper obscured this derivation, removing the classical citations Parkinson had carefully preserved and listing the authors’ names at the front of the book instead, looks deliberate (Francia, 2014) (Francia, 2014) (Francia, 2014). From this perspective, what requires explanation is why a work so largely borrowed from a better original should have so thoroughly displaced that original in popular memory.

Keith Thomas approaches Culpeper as a social historian concerned with the place of astrological practice in English culture. For Thomas, Culpeper’s astrological practice is not an embarrassment requiring explanation but a normal feature of seventeenth-century medical life. A man who saw forty clients per morning was not a fringe figure but a major practitioner whose practice volume exceeded that of most licensed physicians (Thomas, Keith, 1971). Placing Culpeper within the casebook tradition alongside William Lilly, John Booker, and Richard Napier, Thomas shows that astrological medicine served a broad social range and that the integration of astrological theory into herbal prescribing was an intellectually coherent system within its own terms, not superstition awaiting correction (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

Barbara Griggs approaches Culpeper as a sympathetic historian of the herbal tradition for whom he represents a genuine achievement of democratization. Her interest is less in the textual provenance of individual entries than in what Culpeper accomplished: taking expensive medical knowledge and making it cheap, taking Latin monopoly and breaking it, taking complex classical learning and producing something a housewife or apothecary’s assistant could actually use (Griggs, 1981) (Griggs, 1981). Griggs connects the domestic herbal tradition to a long history of household medicine in which women served as primary medical practitioners for their families and communities, a tradition that physicians like Sydenham increasingly disparaged (Griggs, 1981).

These three assessments are not contradictory. Culpeper’s work was largely borrowed from a better source, was organized around a system of astrological medicine that was mainstream in his time, and accomplished a genuine democratization of access to medical knowledge that shaped British and American herbalism for two centuries. The borrowing is real; so is the achievement.

See Also

• John Parkinson
• Vernacular Medicine
• English Herbalism
• Helmontian Medicine
• Pietro Andrea Mattioli
• Medical Publishing
• Medical Reform
• Astrological Medicine

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Francia, S. & Stobart, A. eds. (2014). Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine. London: Bloomsbury. [Source ID: francia-stobart-criticalapproaches-2014] — Lead authority
• Wear, A. (2000). Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Source ID: wear-knowledgepractice-2000]
• Tobyn, G., Denham, A. & Whitelegg, M. (2011). The Western Herbal Tradition. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. [Source ID: tobyn-et-al-western-herbal-tradition-2011]
• Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Source ID: thomas-religiondeclinemagic-1971]
• Griggs, B. (1981). Green Pharmacy: A History of Herbal Medicine. London: Jill Norman & Hobhouse. [Source ID: griggs-greenpharmacy-1981]
• Denham, A. (2013). Herbal Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain. [Source ID: denham-herbal-medicine-19thc-2013]
• Temkin, O. (1973). Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Source ID: temkin-galenism-1973]
• Porter, R. (1997). The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. London: HarperCollins. [Source ID: porter-greatestbenefit-1997]
• Haller, J.S. (1994). Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. [Source ID: haller-medicalprotestants-1994]
• French, R. (2003). Medicine Before Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Source ID: french-medicinebefore-2003]
• Stapley, C. (2012). The History of Herbal Plants. [Source ID: stapley-history-of-plant-2012]