Alternative medicine, 17th century style

Heal Thyself

Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to the People

Benjamin Woolley

HarperCollins: 402 pp., $24.95

*

“Heal Thyself” by Benjamin Woolley is an engrossing bit of elegant social history colored by contemporary suspicions of the establishment -- in this case, the medical establishment.

It is the story of Nicholas Culpeper, who, during the turbulent 17th century struggle in England between king and parliament, Protestant and Catholic, Roundhead and Cavalier, carried the ancient secrets of herbalists to common people longing for medical help in times of plague and cholera in crowded, filthy London. Culpeper’s books have been in print from that day to this. They still are consulted by people who want “natural” cures for what ails them.

In Culpeper’s day, the medical establishment was the Royal College of Physicians, which strove to create and maintain control over medical treatment, such as it was. And it was primitive, based largely on theories and practices of the ancient Greeks. Ordinary people had developed their own systems, ranging from magic charms to potions and unguents derived from plants and shrubs. These recipes were codified in Latin in books detailing the properties of various herbs, but the arcane language in which they were written gave the physicians who consulted them great power over those who could not read them. Culpeper’s achievement, writes Woolley, a British journalist, was to render them in plain English.

Culpeper translated and annotated the classic “Pharmacopoeia Londinensis” and wrote the vastly influential “The English Physitian” or “Culpeper’s Compleat Herbal,” and, with these, came into conflict with the medical establishment.

He was in opposition in other ways too. In a time of great political upheaval, he stood with opponents of King Charles I. They were not just Puritans who came to power under Oliver Cromwell but a broad array of all sorts of religious sects and dissenters. A page of this nicely illustrated book lists some from a 1647 pamphlet: Jesuit, “Arminian,” “Arian,” Adamite, “Libertin,” “Antescripturian,” “Soule Sleeper,” “Anabaptist,” “Familist,” Seeker, Divorcer. Culpeper identified himself with the radicals and became strongly associated in the public mind with John Goodwin, one of the most radical of all.

Woolley contrasts and compares Culpeper with his contemporary William Harvey, whose discovery of the circulation of the blood made him the medical equivalent of Isaac Newton. And Harvey, for all his emphasis on the emerging scientific method, was a follower of the king.

Woolley’s affections are clearly with Culpeper, whom he sees as a people’s advocate. This bias leads him to some conclusions that seem overdone. He quotes a medical historian who says Culpeper “had far greater influence on medical practice in England between 1650 and 1750” than Harvey did. Woolley concedes it is “debatable” that Culpeper saved many lives but that the same is true of Harvey. Yet Harvey pursued a line of scientific inquiry; Culpeper looked to astrology to find a basis for his cures.

So perhaps Woolley displays a modern uneasiness with establishment medicine when he writes that Culpeper “helped to reveal a division that has yet to heal, between orthodox and alternative medicine, between professional expertise and personal empowerment.”

For all its imperfections, science, after 350 years, has won the upper hand over folk tales. It seems unlikely to let go.