Nicholas Culpeper:
English Physician and Astrologer
Book Review found on Amazon.com
by Olav Thulesius
Hardcover. Published by St Martins Pr (Short)
Publication date: April 1992
ISBN: 031207543X
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.
What is the truth about his life? Nobody has yet told his story and the story is
fascinating.
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.
Today, the name Culpeper is found around the word in
connection with shops selling herbs and spices. There is a
chain of such shops in England.
Such shops have been reported not
just all over the old British Empire, but even in Japan! (The spices banner shown is of an
Irish Linen towel purchased in Jamaica circa 1970 as a gift to Royce and Becky Culpepper,
who provided the photograph)
A Culpeper Antidote
Bezoar: A supposed antidote against poison.
The 'bezoar' is a stony calcified hairball or gallstone that occurs
in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals such as goats (though humans
sometimes get them, too). The word is Persian ('pad-zahr',
counter-poison or antidote); the bezoar's fame as a cure for poison
spread westwards from there in medieval times. You swallowed it, or
occasionally rubbed it on the infected part. In A Voyage to Abyssinia,
written by Father Lobo in the eighteenth century, he says: "I had
recourse to bezoar, a sovereign remedy against these poisons, which I
always carried about me". Belief in its near-magical properties was
then common.
Old herbals are full of recipes using it, such as this one from Nicholas
Culpeper's Complete Herbal of 1653: "Take of Pearls
prepared, Crab's eyes, red Coral, white Amber Hart's-horn, oriental
Bezoar, of each half an ounce, powder of the black tops of Crab's claws,
the weight of them all, beat them into powder, which may be made into
balls with jelly, and the skins which our vipers have cast off, warily
dried and kept for use". Culpeper remarks that "four, or five,
or six grains is excellently good in a fever to be taken in any cordial,
for it cheers the heart and vital spirits exceedingly, and makes them
impregnable". Don't try this at home!
If you feel like categorizing them, a 'trichobezoar' is a hairball,
while a 'phytobezoar' is one containing mostly vegetable fibres.
Source: WORLD WIDE WORDS.
Copyright Michael B Quinion,
2000.
Other Nicholas Culpeper Pages
