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    The English Physician
    The English Physician
    The English Physician
    Ebook147 pages1 hour

    The English Physician

    By Nicholas Culpeper and Michael A. Flannery

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    The first medical book published in the American colonies

    The English Physician is a humble vest-pocket-sized 94-page medical guide for the common person, by the prolific herbalist and author Nicholas Culpeper. It was a staple in 17th-century England, as it was short, written in accessible prose, and inexpensive; and perhaps as attractive, it took a decidedly skeptical view of "official" medicine, relying instead on popular remedies. Culpeper’s philosophy was to teach the common folk to minister to themselves by providing them with the tools and knowledge for self-help.

    Published in Boston in 1708 by Nicholas Boone, the American version of The English Physician was widely cited and used at the time. Today only five copies are known to exist. The rarity of this vade mecum of colonial America is wrapped in mystery: Who really wrote this book and when, where, and how did it originate?

    The editor illuminates these mysteries while adding an informative historical introduction on the state of medical knowledge and practice at the time, exploring Culpeper’s position among competing medical writers, and glossing the medical and botanical terms, providing contemporary equivalents. Modern readers will discover the meaning behind the strangely named brews and concoctions of the 17th century and will learn how this Boston printing literally transformed the American landscape with herbs brought from the British colonists’ homeland.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9780817390082
    The English Physician

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      The English Physician - Nicholas Culpeper

      accessible.

      INTRODUCTION

      O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies

      In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities,

      For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

      But to the earth some special good doth give

      SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, ACT II, SCENE 3

      For the earth which drinks in the rain that often comes upon it, and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is cultivated, receives blessing from God.

      HEBREWS 6:7 (NEW KING JAMES VERSION)

      CONNECTIONS

      SOME YEARS AGO there were two interesting PBS documentaries that covered in panoramic fashion the broad sweep of the history of science and technology: Connections (1978) and The Day the Universe Changed (1986). Although given to certain excesses intrinsic to the secular humanistic tendencies of their mercurial host, James Burke, the shows were, on the whole, marvelously clever and informative. In Connections Burke showed viewers how seemingly disparate advances in science and technology were, in fact, connected in some rather interesting ways. Indeed, these connections could be found in major discoveries of commonplace items now taken for granted. For example, he showed how a black viscous liquid oozing from distilled coal (coal tar) captured the interest of Friedrich Bayer and Friedrich Weskott. When they formed a dye-making company and employed the innovative Felix Hoffman as their chemist, he experimented with this waste product, ultimately yielding a stable compound called salicylic acid, from which today’s common aspirin was synthesized.

      Nicholas Culpeper, Nicholas Boone, and The English Physician, which Boone published in Boston in 1708, offer different but no less interesting connections. How was it, for example, that ambitious entrepreneur Nicholas Boone decided to print the very first medical book in the British North American colonies? How was it that he selected not a learned treatise by one of the period’s eminent physicians—Paré, Sydenham, or Harvey—but rather a modest little volume of medicinal recipes that he attributed to a rebel in clear opposition to the learned profession? How was it that the publication of this book would be prophetic in pointing toward a medical counterculture that flourishes in America to this very day? The answers to these questions shed light not only on the transference of medical knowledge from one side of the Atlantic to another but also on the life and contributions of Nicholas Culpeper—astrologer, herbalist, and practitioner of physic—who may readily be regarded as the morning star of alternative medicine in America. This points up yet another curious connection—with a morning star of a different kind, one of biblical proportions.

      JOHN WYCLIFFE AND NICHOLAS CULPEPER: MORNING STARS OF REFORMATIONS

      John Wycliffe died in 1384, 232 years before Culpeper was born.¹ Nevertheless, the two were kindred spirits. An independent thinker, Wycliffe capitalized on the papal schism of 1378 to challenge religious orthodoxy by proclaiming Rome corrupt and its doctrines wicked. The learned CARDINAL elite he dubbed with the derisive acronym Captain of the Apostates of the Realm of the Devil, Impudent and Nefarious Ally of Lucifer.² Not so much a systematic religious thinker as an expositor of institutional corruption, social abuse, and biblical error, Wycliffe challenged the church’s claim to absolute authority and mocked such priestly pretensions as absurd and unscriptural. The Bible should be the church’s sole authority, he argued, and his insistence that the Bible should be translated into the language of the people instead of kept in the Latin Vulgate of the ruling class fit in well with ideas such as the doctrine of a priesthood of all believers that became the cornerstone of the Reformation two hundred years later.

      Wycliffe soon built a following called Lollards (originally a derisive term meaning mumblers), who disseminated his ideas and eventually managed to carry out their leader’s wish in translating the entire Bible from Latin into English. An earlier, more literal translation eventually gave way to a posthumous version in 1388 that modern editor W. R. Cooper has called a superior, powerful rendition of the Scriptures.³ Despite persecution, the persistence of the Lollards bore fruit in numerous texts of what soon became known as The Wycliffe Bible.⁴ From these texts came glossed Gospels, sermon cycles, and doctrinal tracts that would change the face of Christendom forever. When Bohemian King Wencelas IV’s sister, Anne, married Richard II of England in 1382, ideas from the British Isles began filtering into the Continent, and John Huss soon found himself captivated by the ideas of Wycliffe. Huss would pay with his life for those ideas, but his reformist views à la Wycliffe influenced a German cleric-turned-iconoclast named Martin Luther. No wonder, then, that Wycliffe has been widely regarded as "the morning star of the

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