The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom

Description

From the best-selling author of The Queen's Conjuror, comes the story of Nicholas Culpeper -- legendary rebel, radical, Puritan, and author of the great Herbal. This is a powerful history of medicine's first freedom fighter set in London during Britain's age of revolution. In the mid-seventeenth century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war which saw levels of slaughter not matched until the Somme, famine in a succession of failed harvests that reduced peasants to 'anatomies', epidemics to rival the Black Death in their enormity, and infant mortality rates that left childless even women who had bourne eight or nine children. In the midst of these terrible times came Nicholas Culpeper's Herbal -- one of the most popular and enduring books ever published. Culpeper was a virtual outcast from birth. Rebelling against a tyrannical grandfather and the prospect of a life in the church, he abandoned his university education after a doomed attempt at elopement. Disinherited, he went to London, Milton's 'city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty'. There he was to find his vocation in instigating revolution. London's medical regime was then in the grip of the College of Physicians, a powerful body personified in the 'immortal' William Harvey, anatomist, royal physician and discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Working in the underground world of religious sects, secret printing presses and unlicensed apothecary shops, Culpeper challenged this stronghold at the time it was reaching the very pinnacle of its power -- and in the process helped spark the revolution that toppled a monarchy. In a spellbinding narrative of impulse, romance and heroism, Benjamin Wooley vividly recreates these momentous struggles and the roots of today's hopes and fears about the power of medical science, professional institution and government. The Herbalist tells the story of a medical rebel who took on the authorities and paid the price.

Benjamin Woolley is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He is the author of the best-selling The Queen's Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr John Dee. His first book, Virtual Worlds was short-listed for the Rhone-Poulenc prize and has been translated into eight languages. His second, The Bride of Science, examined the life of Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter. He has written and presented for the BBC's The Late Show, including programmes on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and the architecture of Tokyo. He has won the Arts Journalist of the Year award and an Emmy for his commentary for Discovery's 'Three Minutes to Impact'. He lives in London.

'This is a wonderful book - a delight to read, fast-moving, informed and passionate in its advocacy. It is a vivid and compelling portrait of the world turned upside down' Sir Roy Strong, Sunday Times 'The research is superb - rich, detailed, and original - and the lives Benjamin Woolley describes are as passionate as the great events of the English Civil War around which they orbit' Adam Nicolson 'Immensely readable ! This book is more than a biography' Independent on Sunday This is a London story, one of grubby back streets, of mass hysteria, of religious bigotry, of a quarter of a million people living out the world of Apocalypse Now. Never before have I felt the kinship between the London of the English Civil War and revolutionary Paris so strongly. The atmosphere is one heady with fear and rumour, twin emotions capable of triggering off virtually anything in an era when the movement of the heavens portended the death of kings and the Second Coming. This is the world of Nicholas Culpeper! This is a wonderful book -- a delight to read, fast-moving, informed and passionate in its advocacy. It is a vivid and compelling portrait of the world turned upside down, of people-power run riot, of a great city dissolving into chaos, a place where the irrational had become the norm as ordinary people responded to Lilly and Culpeper's prophecies and prognostications.' Roy Strong, Sunday Times