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Not Just the Tudors
Nicholas Culpeper: Herbalist and Radical
00:47:13
The maverick herbalist who fought for medical freedom
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash. Subscribe.
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Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:33]
Benjamin Woolley
McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch Snack wrap Spicy snack wrap.
- [01:40]
Tristan Hughes
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- [01:43]
Benjamin Woolley
Snack wrap is back.
- [01:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In a time of plague and purges, of autocratic monarchs and closed city gates, Nicholas Culpepper set out to do the unthinkable. Democratize medicine. He turned his back on the College of Physicians, the exclusive guild that sought to keep knowledge behind Latin walls, and instead took to the hedgerows, the back streets and the forest paths of England to seek cures not for kings, but for but for commoners. Born in 1616 and raised under the stern watch of a Puritan grandfather, Culpepper defied every authority placed over him. He spurned Cambridge, fled a failed apprenticeship and joined a rebellion against the king, Settling into the liberty of Spitalfields, which sat outside the jurisdiction of the medical establishment, he opened his doors to the sick and the poor treating thousands with herbs and remedies passed down by women, midwives and wise folk. His great sin, publishing an English translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londiniensis, a medical text the college had kept in Latin for over a century. Culpepper was a radical, a risk taker, and to some, a rogue, but also a pioneer of accessible healthcare whose books are still in circulation to this day. Joining me to unpick the extraordinary life and legacy of this defiant herbalist is is Benjamin Woolley, the biographer and author of the Herbis Nicholas Culpepper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. In this work, he also covers the life of Culpepper's contemporary, William Harvey, personal physician to King Charles I. But he's attempted to adjust the historical record by giving Culpepper the attention that up until now has been only reserved for Harvey. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Ben, welcome back to the podcast.
- [04:14]
Benjamin Woolley
Hello. Nice to be back.
- [04:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Great to talk to you again. So we're thinking about infection and disease and the treatment of these things in the 17th century. Can you give me some sense of how they understood disease at this time?
- [04:32]
Benjamin Woolley
Well, there was no germ theory, so there was no idea of some tiny little microorganism that was responsible for spreading disease. It was mostly to do with bad air. I mean, malaria, you know, the term that actually means bad air, doesn't it? And which was actually something that was endemic at the time in England, indeed afflicted. James I:6 and so there was this idea that the air could be poisonous. And we still have that with the idea of, I suppose, getting a lung full of fresh air or country air, that the idea that air can carry disease, and of course it can if the germs spread through the air. But they thought it was the air itself, a miasma, as it were, that caused infection. And the result of that is that all the medical attention paid to infectious disease was all about that and how you would try and deal with it when it came to the actual operation of medicines, how they were, what they were supposed to do, that relied on this ancient Greek idea of the body being made up of humors that were black bile and yellow bile and blood. And we have echoes of it still in our language. When you talk about somebody being sanguine that was having too much blood or hot blood. And there were these associations between these humors and the way the world was made up, air, earth, fire, water. And that in turn, which is Where Nicholas comes into the picture to a certain extent, was associated with astrological signs as well. So there was a sort of whole system built around that which was used to try and make people feel better. I mean, what that amounted to was giving them substances that were listed in the Pharmacopoeia Londonensis, which you mentioned. Nicholas later translated in his career, using all sorts of medications from there, which included things like. I mean, one of them was called Physiothaltum, which was the ground up remains of a dried mummy, as in Egyptian mummy, that is. And there was a substitute if you couldn't get hold of that. I can't quite remember what it was, but it was something like soot. But anyway, so there were these extraordinary medicines that were being prescribed at the time that were listed in detail in the pharmacopoeia. And also there was this heritage, this tradition of herbal medicine, which was completely separate essentially from what the doctors were doing. They saw themselves as in charge of a system. Well, there's a lot of controversy actually at the time of what that system was, whether it should involve chemicals, chemical medicine, which was a controversial subject at the time. But these various quite expensive, rather rare substances were used. But people who lived in villages around England, they didn't have access to doctors. They didn't have access to even apothecaries, which is what Nicholas trained as an apothecary being, I suppose you could say a chemist, if you like. The person who you would get your drugs from and who would mix them up, it would be from herbs, and it would be herbs prescribed often by what was known as a cunning woman or a woman who was associated with dispensing medicine at the time. So it was a very fractured medical world and what kind of medicine you got depended wholly on your social status. But the odd thing is, is whether you got better medical care as somebody who was rich, at least in terms of the actual medicines that were dispensed, is highly questionable. You probably would have done better under Nicholas care than William Harvest.
- [08:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So did Nicholas, in his education, come across midwives and female herbalists and cunning folk who would have contributed to his sum of medical knowledge?
- [08:38]
Benjamin Woolley
He was brought up in the midst of the Sussex countryside. So he was born, as you said, in 1616, a few months after the death of his father. So his mother had to basically move in with her father, his grandfather, who was this Puritan called William Attersall, who was a terrifying figure by all accounts. But he lived in rural Sussex, near, in fact, Wakehurst, which is where some distant Relatives of his lived, which is now actually where you have the National Seed bank and things like that. And Kew Gardens have an outpost in Wakehurst. So it's got a nice sort of resonance with Nicholas Culpepper's Culpepper living in the area. But he was surrounded by folk medicine. I would say that was what he would have been familiar with growing up. He did go to university, but he didn't study medicine at university. He certainly didn't have the kind of education that William Harvey, who's this sort of very, very prominent royal physician who lived at the same time as Nicholas and was, in my telling of Nicholas's story, was somewhat his antagonist, even though whether or not they even met is not clear. But Nicholas was brought up much more in that tradition than in the affair. College of Physicians tradition of Galenic medicine, as it's often called because it goes right back to the era of Galen. So William Harvey, who I treat as something of an antagonist, who was a Roman physician who used to treat the gladiators. So that was how old his official medical traditions were. And that was not the tradition in which Nicholas was brought up, in which I suppose you would now call folk medicine or something like that.
- [10:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned the college physicians there. So tell me about the medical authorities in London in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- [10:21]
Benjamin Woolley
Yeah. So firstly it was just for London, this college of physicians, and it went back to Henry VIII's time he set it up. It was a extremely powerful body of not that many physicians. There were, if I think it was 30 odd, serving all of London at the time, which was several hundred thousand inhabitants by this stage. Essentially their primary role was to care for the King's health and welfare. That was why they were kind of licensed, but their license meant that only they could practice medicine in London or within eight miles, I think it is, of the centre of London. They had a total monopoly of medical practice in that area and anyone else who tried to practice medicine in that area in London would be hauled up before a court that the College of Physicians used to. It had a semi judicial role, among other things. It was a regulator, if you like, as well as a club for physicians. And people faced fines and indeed imprisonment if they broke the College of Physicians monopoly in any way or if they challenged it. And this is where Nicholas got into trouble. Because the Pharmacopeia Londonensis was the bible of medicine at the time. All medications had to essentially be derived from what was listed in the pharmacopoeia and it was written in Latin. And apothecaries. So these were the people who actually had to mix and make up the medicines and dispense them and often act in a sort of semi medical practitioner role. And indeed the Society of Apothecaries, which was their sort of their guild, would go on to essentially become associated with general practitioners, actually less chemists or pharmacists, as we would call them now, but general practice, because they essentially were the front line of medical treatment in London at the time. But they were doing it according to recipes, as they were called, prescriptions set out by the doctors in the pharmacopoeia. And basically barely any apothecaries could have understood Latin, so they were doing it by rote. It was for them, it was. They were just implementing some sort of code that they weren't able to understand. And Culpepper, because he unexpectedly was able to go to Cambridge for two years, had learnt Latin and he set about translating this book into English and got into an awful lot of trouble as a result. He was thrown out of the Society for Apothecaries. He had to, as you mentioned in your introduction, practice his medicine outside the city walls in one of the liberties, in order to escape basically the regulatory authorities within the city. And it was the publication from that that he built. I mean, it didn't appear till right towards the end of his life, but that became what actually he was subsequently better known for, which was his book the English Physician, or Culpepper's Herbal, as it became informally known as. Culpepper's Herbal was essentially his version of a pharmacopoeia for ordinary people.
- [13:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, before his time. Are you suggesting those apothecaries got their knowledge just from.
- [13:47]
Benjamin Woolley
Yes, trade knowledge. It was, you know, they were a trade protected by a guild. They knew how to mix various medicines. They had the skills and equipment to do that. And Nicholas began his career as an apprentice to an apothecary, one on Fleet street, overlooking the point where Fleet street marks the limits from between Westminster, seat of government, obviously, and the city, seat of commerce. So perfectly placed for all sorts of customers to come in. And he would be working in the back room with mortars and pestles and all sorts of dried ingredients and mixing unguents and potions and so on for sale to the customers of the physicians. Quite often, you know, poultices, things like that, that needed to be applied using leather, bandages and such like, would be applied by the apothecary. So they would actually not just provide the medicines.
- [14:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can you give me an idea what life would have been like for a young apprentice in London at this time and what Nicholas would have learnt in his apprenticeship.
- [14:59]
Benjamin Woolley
So having had a somewhat sort of stormy upbringing, raised by his puritan grandfather, his mother dying when he reached his teens and trying to elope, the daughter of a local Sussex noble, although we don't really know anything about that, he ended up doing what many did at the time, by being put out of trouble, by being given an apprenticeship in London. And in his case, his apprenticeship was with an apothecary, an apothecary who had a shop on Fleet. And essentially Nicholas was attached to the apothecary for seven years. He had to work for the apothecary in return for board and lodging. And there he would learn the craft of an apothecary. And what that was was learning how to mix medicines, medicines that were listed very strictly in the pharmacopoeia London Ensys, using all the equipment, the apothecary would have all the equipment needed to do that. I mean, famously the mortar and pestle, but all sorts of other bill making equipment and so on. And so for in the back room of this apothecary, he's called Simon White. In the back room of his shop he would mix his medicines. He might have even gone out with White and gone to buy some of the medicines from down at the docks because many of them were imported, of course, because they were quite exotic ingredients and also go to patients on behalf of physicians and apply these medicines. So, you know, slathering on various vortices and things like that to treat illnesses. And trouble was, apprentices had a really tough time in London at this time. And Nicholas did what happened. You know, not uncommonly, Simon White absconded with the money that Nicholas's grandfather had had to pay the apothecary to take on Nicholas. And so the Society of Apothecaries found another apothecary for him to be apprenticed to. So it was a rough life for an apprentice at that time. You had very little, few freedoms. You were totally dependent on your master, the person who was teaching you the craft. You could only practice the craft, having gone through these seven years of training. And then you would get what was called your freedom. Nicholas never got to that point because his education was so disrupted, as it were, by his apprentice absconding with those funds, leaving him with nothing. Essentially he teamed up with another apprentice. And this is when this plan of trying to actually start to practice medicine for themselves started to form in Nicholas's mind.
- [17:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And he started to hear some fairly radical ideas about this time as well, didn't he?
- [17:44]
Benjamin Woolley
His life coincides with the buildup to the Civil War, and he associated with various religious sects that were active in London at the time. And, I mean, this was the politics that was going on at this period and is aligned with his view of medicine. He was clear, you know, you'd call him a radical now he was a radical. You call him an activist radical. He would go to these churches where there would be preachers who would be preaching. Some of the radical ideas that were starting to head towards in the mid to late 1630s, were starting to sort of move, shift in a direction towards not outright republicanism, but where, you know, ideas that you might call more democratic were starting to surface, and they were surfacing through these sort of religious, radical, religious groups. And he started to align with these, but he also started to do that through the practice of astrology. And astrology became a sort of language for starting to explore these dangerous ideas such as republicanism in London at the time. Specifically, there was somebody who was associated with astrology and medicine at the time called William Lilly, who lived near to Nicholas. Again, I could not find direct links between the two, but they would have certainly encountered each other because they were shared religious beliefs and would have probably been in the same congregations of these radical preachers and things like that. And William Lilly and Nicholas subsequently started to use the language of astrology to question the role of the king in ruling the country. So specifically, the sun became representative of the monarchy. So you would have these tracts, these ingenious, apparently astrological tracts that William Lilly would use, Just one of many, actually, which were starting to sort of question these ideas. And Nicholas was in the thick of that milieu, if you like, in the thick of that new set of ideas that were beginning to emerge, this odd and potent cocktail of radical religion and astrology.
- [20:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So he's abandoned his apprenticeship and set up as an independent. And as we talked about, he had to do so outside the city walls. Was it potentially rather dangerous to set up an unlicensed medical practice?
- [20:23]
Benjamin Woolley
It was potentially dangerous. Well, he was never arrested, as far as I can tell. It's very hard to tell because there are actually very good records of what the physicians were doing in terms of regulating medicine at the time of these sort of courts that they would set up in order to examine people who were thought to be practicing medicine illegally. But there are gaps in them, unfortunately. There's great scholarship collecting together the transcripts of some of these trials. If that's the word for them. These hearings, which were conducted by the likes of Harvey, who was actually censor of the College of Physicians, in other words, he was in charge of the regulatory aspects of the College's work. And whether or not he was brought up in front of them isn't clear. But he became a constant subject of. In the College of Physicians publications. Well, in the writing specifically of doctors who are members of the College, he would often be identified as a quack, a quack salver, as an illegal operator, as somebody who was dispensing poisons to patients, that sort of thing, in order to try and discredit him. And his name was rather convenient from that point of view because culpepper could be seen as a term for toilet paper, basically. And all manner of means were used by the medical establishment, if you like, to try and shut him down. But that only seemed to intensify his activism in that area.
- [21:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And he seems to have been very popular. Why so?
- [22:00]
Benjamin Woolley
Well, he was very popular because he offered cheap medical treatment and somebody to talk to about these things. And the triumph really, of Nicholas's career was that he started to write these books, initially inspired by his translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londonensis, introducing folk medicine into this sort of context of medical recipes, medicines, basically, he started to introduce them. This became the English Physician. But then he moved on for that, on from that, to look at what I suppose you might call aspects of social medicine. Perhaps some of his most interesting works was he wrote a book about midwifery. Midwives were then nearly always men, and midwifery was seen as a purely medical practice. But he started to sort of widen out what that was about, how it could be done in a way that would reduce the, absolutely, by modern standards, awful infant mortality of the time. He was also very interested in female sexuality. He wrote about that in a way that few others who were published at the time did. He was also. He also. He even wrote in one of his tracts, a Argument for the Humane Treatment of Animals. He was very concerned about that. Whereas William Harvey, by contrast, was famous for his love of dissection, which included his dissecting his wife's pet parrot.
- [23:40]
Tristan Hughes
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Tristan Hughes
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Benjamin Woolley
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Tristan Hughes
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Benjamin Woolley
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Benjamin Woolley
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- [25:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it feels as if part of what was revolutionary about what Culpepper was doing was this element of pastoral care. Can you paint a picture of what a patient visiting Culpepper might have seen, heard and smelled and experienced?
- [25:42]
Benjamin Woolley
There's very little that we know about it, but we do know, for example, something that might be familiar to many of us. He seemed to have a very crowded waiting room because he was offering cheap, if not free, sometimes free, medical advice to people. The size of the actual building is very unclear. There are a few hints at it, but it was a large, ish sort of building that wouldn't have been he wouldn't have had a consulting room of the sort, you know, if you imagine a gps now, it wouldn't really be like that, but it might have been that he had other people who were, you know, sort of exiles of the apothecaries helping him. And he would have it was 30 or 40 people in the morning who would be lining up for help. And he would how much of the actual medicine he would dispense is unclear. He wouldn't have had a whole pharmacy, as it were, at his disposal. It was more about providing medical advice as to what sort of medicines could be used. And of course, they would have to be what was available and plentiful in the fields around London. This is a time when London was still, you know, within a few a short walk. People, even in the city were a short walk away from what we would now identify as fields. So there were herbs to be had. And he mentions in what became the Culpepper herbal, where you could find particularly useful herbs. There was sort of a set of herbs that were particular he was particularly enthusiastic about because they seemed to have effects that would help people such as tansy and angelica and I mean, herbs that are still around. But the way they were prepared and how you would take them would be where his expertise came in and which was the most suitable for dealing with digestive issues. They were very common or obviously fever and other things caused by infectious disease. And some of them were quite sophisticated mixtures, such as what was known as London treacle, which was. Treacles were a term that was used for mixtures of medicine in a treacle in order to make them more palatable, because a lot of these herbs were absolutely revolting to have to eat or taste or whatever. And there were several well known mixes that we used at times of plague and things like that. And he would have dispensed those.
- [28:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One thing that it feels like he might not have dispensed with was the diagnostic method of looking at urine, but he does. And he, he rejected that as a, as part of his medical practice. Why is that?
- [28:28]
Benjamin Woolley
Yes, he did. He told a droll little story about the study of urine, which was a standard medical practice, which was essentially this woman went to see her doctor with a sample of her husband's urine and the doctor had divined that the husband had a bad bruise. And she confirmed that this was the case. And he said that he must have fallen downstairs. And she confirmed that that was the case. And then he said, and he fell down. I would have said 10 stairs. And she said, well, you're wrong there, doctor, because it was three flights of steps, 30 stairs. And he said, well, when you were bringing this sample to me, did any of it spill out? And she had to confess that it did. And he said, well, that's where your 20 stairs were lost. So that was his little droll story in order to demonstrate what the use of urine to try and make a diagnosis was about. I don't think he saw. I just think he saw these as methods of making it unnecessarily complicated in order to try and work out what people were suffering from and to cast it in a sort of mysticism. I know that might sound ironic given his connection with astrology, but he was very much a down to earth physician. If you read the book. You can see how down to earth he is about it. But he kind of brings astrology into it in order to give a framing for his medical theory, because he couldn't draw on the standard Galenic medical theory and so on. He was having to explain the interaction of illness with the world that people found themselves. Themselves in.
- [30:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I mean, really, you suggest that while he does, of course, make use of astrology and has been criticized for that, it didn't actually have the central role in his medical practice of philosophy that he's making out.
- [30:23]
Benjamin Woolley
It does not really. No. I mean, if you read the book, it's always a sort of a little color. He's adding a little color to what the power of a particular herb might be to, I suppose, explain it, to advertise it, to make it memorable, actually, probably more than anything, because, of course, many of the people who he would have treated would have been illiterate, so wouldn't have had any way of recording what he was talking about. So he used it. I think it gave him a kind of framework. I think that's what it did do. And, of course, for most people living in a rural setting at that time, there was a connection between the sun and the moon and the stars, the movement of the zodiac and the seasons and so on, and the natural world around them. The two were intertwined. And it was that way that he sort of tied one into the other, and it took him away from the, if you like, the medicalized model that the physicians were interested in, which sort of ignored that aspect of people's everyday experience, which would have shaped their view towards the powers of herbs to treat their illnesses.
- [31:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what's fascinating is we've talked about this radical nature of his medical practice, and it feels like it's being paralleled in his political thoughts and being paralleled in what is happening in the country at the time. Because we have the overturning of social order to the point of a king being beheaded. And in his work, Culpepper seems to be doing precisely that. And he's overturning a hierarchy that keeps medical knowledge arcane, that reveals what medicines are for, that doesn't censor in a way that had been the case before Culpepper's work. Is that a fair conclusion?
- [32:18]
Benjamin Woolley
Yeah. I mean, this idea of a central authority, I think, was something that he was questioning. He was making people feel that local medicine was something that was as valid as official medicine, if you like. I mean, there's stunning contrasts between William Harvey and Nicholas Culpepper in the sense that William Harvey was at this time discovering the circulation of the blood. Exactly at this time. His experimentations was going to revolutionize era revolutions, revolutionize the medical model, how the body works, how people saw the body work. Before Harvey, blood was seen as more like SAP in a tree, that it was something that spread through the body to the extremities in order to give it life. The circulation completely blew that out the water and it completely undermined the basic model that medics were using, the humoral model, you know, the humors. This idea of humors completely undermined that. And William Harvey framed this argument that he had about the. The circulation of the blood, which was so controversial actually in a book dedicated to the King, to Charles Add to sort of demonstrate this idea of a heart, of the way the world worked. I mean, he used the heart as a sort of model for what the King as the King's role in the body politic, if you like. Nicholas Culpepper was doing the exact opposite of that. He wasn't going for an understanding of the body by firstly by taking it apart for literally cutting it to bits, which was Harvey's method. And I have to say, you know, scientifically speaking, an absolute brilliant analysis of how the body worked and why some of the medicines that were being practiced at the time didn't produce the results that were expected. But on the other hand, we have Culpepper who ties the environment around people, the everyday environment around them, the plants they see, the animals they see into a greater scheme which they fit into. I mean, you know, it's alternative medicine now or holism or those kinds of things, putting it in modern terms. But doing it at that time was not just a medical act, it was a political act. And it was the reason why he entered. He became a soldier in the Civil War and fought for the parliamentarians. He was on that side of the argument in so many different ways. And it was reflected not just in his medicine, but in his. In what he did, in his politics and ultimately in his fighting.
- [35:00]
Tristan Hughes
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- [35:30]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [35:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In his fighting, did he survive the Civil War?
- [35:59]
Benjamin Woolley
He fought in the Civil War on the sides of the parliamentarians and suffered a wound in the First Battle of Newbury in 1643, which seems to have hit him in the chest, causing him problems with breathing. However, he was a heavy smoker. He managed to survive for more or less a decade after that, but he eventually succumbed to some breathing problem or other. Again, it's not entirely clear, it's not spelled out what the exact nature of the illness that finally caught him. It could well have been lung cancer. You know, I mean, one of the things he was a powerful proponent of the delights and medical advantages of smoking. So that's slightly out of kilter with where we are at the moment, but and as actually very out of kilter with King James, of course, who thought of tobacco as being a terrible vice, the taking of tobacco. He was in the thick of it in the Civil War, as was William Harvey. William Harvey had to help look after Charles's children in a bush in one of the battles. There's a famous anecdote around that. So both of them were on opposite sides and both of them were right in the thick of it. And as far as one can tell, Nicholas never fully recovered from his wounds. But I think that's what pushed him into writing and made him such a prolific writer of these various books designed to help people understand, take control of their own health.
- [37:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What then was Nicholas Culpepper's legacy? What is it today?
- [37:30]
Benjamin Woolley
Well, one of his legacies is he produced what is arguably the most successful English language book other than the Bible of all time, because what became known as Culpepper's Herbal has remained in print ever since. It's still in print. You can still get copies of it on Amazon, though to be honest, you can obviously download it quite easily as well for free. It's still published. It was hugely influential as a book in the development of medicine in America, in North America. He's still a name to conjure with there. And it changed the discussion around medicine and how medicine should be practiced. Having said that, the college physicians still with us and I'm not wanting to paint Them as the baddies in this story. They've got a magnificent modernist building in Regent's park, which is where they're based. They've got a fantastic library, and I thank them for allowing me to have access to it because it contains many of the most important books and manuscripts relating to this era. Nicholas, on the other hand, his legacy in terms of print is enormous. His legacy in terms of other archival sources is miniscule. And it was really difficult to try and find out much about Nicholas's life because he was kind of, I suppose you would say, written out, or nobody bothered to kind of maintain an archive of his works. Most of what we know about him comes from a biography, which was a sort of appendix to one edition, early edition, of his English physician, what became the Culpepper's Herbal. So we know I could find frustratingly little about him, but I do think that his legacy is, in a sense, introducing the idea of public and social medicine in the early modern era, as we call it, in that period, the Stuart period and the Civil War period. He was part of that extraordinary change in how society worked in Britain at the time. And he certainly embedded this idea of medicine being something for the people, not just for the rich. He embedded that, through his works, deeply into, I think, the public consciousness.
- [39:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Benjamin Woolley, thank you so much for taking the time to tell us about Nicholas Culpepper, this extraordinary, influential figure. Thank you.
- [40:03]
Benjamin Woolley
Thank you.
- [40:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That was the wonderful Benjamin Woolley. Last year, I spoke to medieval historian Dr. Laurie Jones for our episode how to Survive the Plague, and I asked her about plague tracks, books and pamphlets produced between the 14th and 18th centuries that spread information and misinformation, as well as suggested remedies for plague when it ravaged England during this time. I asked her what sort of prevention methods and treatments were prescribed in these documents.
- [40:36]
Dr. Laurie Jones
Plague is a bacterial disease, and without antibiotics, they could not actually treat the disease in the way that we would treat it today. Most of their treatments were actually meant to reduce pain, reduce fever, reduce the swellings of the buboes themselves. So in that sense, they probably were effective, at least in making people feel better, reducing the severity of the symptoms. Obviously, a lot of people died because they couldn't treat the disease itself, the bacteria. And I think a lot of people tend to read medieval, early modern medicine medical texts and think they're hogwashed. They don't know what they're doing because obviously they didn't know about bacteria and viruses. But if we flip that and say if they're treating the symptoms and making people feel better, then to a large extent, they did work.
- [41:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's very interesting. That means that there's use even in things that we would think not terribly useful.
- [41:35]
Dr. Laurie Jones
Exactly. And there's actually some historians and scientists working together in a variety of different places, testing out some of these remedies to see how effective they might have been. And we now know, for example, that something as simple as honey, which appears in a lot of medieval medical recipes, including fruit pike, has some antibacterial properties. So spread on a cut or something, it actually can work. A lot of our pain and inflammation medicine that we have now, it's chemical based, it's synthetic, but it's based on the same principles as the herbal remedies that people in the past use. So how many times can you go into a drugstore or a pharmacy and see things like St. John's Wort and calamine, and you name it, it's there. And all of those things were still used in the past.
- [42:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I think there's something important to be said about the role of placebos. So whether they worked or not, if you believe that they work, that has an important effect.
- [42:36]
Dr. Laurie Jones
Doesn't does. Absolutely. And I think how many times people now will take paracetamol or I'll take some ibuprofen, and it doesn't fix what's wrong with them, but it makes them feel better.
- [42:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. The sense of control that you can do something is important.
- [42:51]
Dr. Laurie Jones
And so I do. When I'm teaching, I still use articles about what's called the chicken butt recipe, where they'll pluck a chicken and put its anus on the bubos to suck the pus out and keep doing that until the chicken dies. And of course, the students all think it's insane, it's crazy, and why would they do something like that? But if you look at the thinking behind why they thought it would work, if you look at the world through their eyes, it made perfect sense. And yes, although putting a chicken on your arm's not going to really do anything, we still use chicken soup to make ourselves feel better. Whether it actually has any value or not, I don't know. But chicken soup has been around forever as something that you take when you're sick.
- [43:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I tell you my two favorite examples? There's one, I think it's 1563, which is the Royal College of Physicians noting that there had been an epidemic of wood lice and wondering if that's connected to the plague. And the second one is the 17th century example of the boy from Eton who got flogged for not smoking his pipe because they thought tobacco was a preventative of the plague. How should we understand these?
- [43:57]
Dr. Laurie Jones
Again, it's putting ourselves in their mind. And I think with the tobacco one, as far as I recall, it's not so much the tobacco itself, the smoke that it produces, that it was thought that it would make the air smell better. So in a world where bad smells and miasma were thought to transmit disease, if you could get rid of the bad smells around you or freshen up the air around you, it made sense. And so once tobacco was brought over from the Americas, it was one of the great new things that was thought to cleanse the air. So if people weren't following the prescriptions that were given to them, then they could be punished. The wood lice is an interesting one, and it's one that I didn't really follow that closely when I was doing my research. But it's this whole idea that as animals and bugs and insects start to proliferate, are they also causing disease? Are they spreading disease? And some people could look at that as. Is that an early sense of fleas spreading it? I don't think so, but it's, again, it's a recognition that something isn't right in my environment. And so maybe that's what's causing the disease to spread.
- [45:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Perhaps it's a prediction of disease as opposed to the cause of it.
- [45:08]
Dr. Laurie Jones
Exactly.
- [45:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What do we know about the public demand for the text? I mean, who was the consumer? How were they published?
- [45:14]
Dr. Laurie Jones
It's actually a really good question. When they were produced in manuscript, they actually circulated quite frequently. And there's one particular plague track by a man named John of Burgundy that I've done a fair bit of research on. It was the most popular one in England, and there's almost 140 manuscript copies of it that still survive today. And tracing who owned it, there's anything from the royal court. Henry VII's mother had a copy of this. King Charles in France had a copy of it. Members of Parliament had copies. A lot of monasteries and convents had copies, but so did just average physicians had copies. Average householders that could afford to have a manuscript in their home had copies. So it really appealed to people from, I won't say all levels of society, because obviously the people who are poor or couldn't read wouldn't have had a copy. But all levels of society, among those who had the means and the ability to have one of these texts and to read it, would have these texts, and then once they transitioned into print, they were sold usually unbound, so not very expensive, maybe a few pence for each one. So, again, anybody who could afford one would have them. They'd copy them and then start circulating them among their friends and their family members. So the distribution was actually a lot wider than what we might think just with looking at sales figures, for example, they were pretty prolific. And if we look at the number of surviving copies, that tells us, you know, you have to multiply that by whatever factor to know how many would have been circulating at the time.
- [46:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, considering their central purpose was to provide medical information, how did they evolve into political and social commentary, even religious doctrine?
- [47:01]
Dr. Laurie Jones
That's a great question. And the religious doctrine is almost a separate question in a sense, which I'll touch on first. Because during the Reformation, especially the early 16th century, and as the 16th century went on, it was no longer just physicians who were writing these tracts, but also I have some written by political people, by surgeons, by apothecaries, but a large number were written by clerics, so either priests or monks or what have you. What they would often do was copy the plague track format, but actually be offering religious remedies rather than medical remedies. And there became a bit of a battle between whether medical secular advice was more important than religious advice. And some of that battle's played out in the tracks. And I would argue that a lot of the medical writers who added religious commentary to their tracts were doing so to keep them relevant and to make sure that they can keep attracting the audience that they wanted to address their tracts to and not lose them to the ones who were just solely doing religious writing, because certainly later that started to Wane in the 17th and 18th centuries. I actually have tracts from England especially, where somebody would say, I need to add in this little religious bit, because if I don't, I'm going to be blamed for being an atheist. So here you go. Okay, now let's move on, and we'll talk about what I really want to talk about. It's actually quite fun to look at that, but in terms of the social and political commentary. So we have growing levels of poverty in England, and it becomes very visual as the number of people without homes, the number of beggars on the streets, the number of vagabonds increases substantially during the 16th century, and people become really concerned about society breaking down. And we see at exactly the same time, a lot of the medical writers start to point their finger at these poor people as being the source of plague. They are the ones who are, because of their really poor living conditions, they are actually called living sluttishly, which doesn't mean what it means today. But just living very poorly, eating very poorly, too many people living in one house. And the whole idea was those are the conditions that generate plague. And so they start to be blamed. So we start to see in a lot of the administrative orders of how to prevent the disease, this whole idea that the poor must be controlled, they must not be allowed to enter our cities, they must not be allowed to be begging and moving from place to place. So there's a lot of that discussion in the English tracts, but the same discussion doesn't happen in the French ones, except for maybe one or two Protestant writers, which I thought was really interesting. I didn't get a chance to unpack that a little bit more. It's only the Protestant writers that talk about this. The majority Catholic writers in France instead talk about the plague of Calvinism and start to blame the Calvinists, the Huguenots, the other Protestant groups, for being the spreaders of plague. And this is the time in France where we have the wars of religion. And that really starts to play out in the plague tracks, which again, should just be medical texts. But you start to see all of this underlying religious and political commentary, which again goes away over time once the war settled down. But the whole idea of we're starting to find others labeling others as the source of our disease, as the spreaders of our disease.
- [50:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That was the brilliant Dr. Laurie Jones speaking to me on the episode how to Survive the Plague. You can find a link to the full episode in our show notes. It's well worth a listen. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to edit Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time.
- [51:23]
Dr. Laurie Jones
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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