Product Description

From best-selling author of The Queen's Conjuror, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #541559 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 402 pages

Review
'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... 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'Taking medicine as a lens on English society at a critical fulcrum between the medieval and the modern, it reveals some of the muddled half- steps by which political thought, science and the understanding of the human body have stumbled towards their modern condition. 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'A fascinating, brilliant account of the Renaissance world picture...' Kathryn Hughes, New Statesman'Woolley handsomely captures a society torn between rationality and romance, cynicism and hero worship'. New Scientist'An informative and enlightening book... immensely enjoyable, its narrative exciting and inexorable. I have not read as stimulating a study of the Elizabethan period since Charles Nicholl's book on Marlowe, The Reckoning'. Thomas Wright, Daily Telegraph

Born in Ockley, Surrey, in 1616, Nicolas Culpeper seemed destined for a life defying authority. He rebelled at home as a child, dropped out of Cambridge as a student, and fell out with the apothecary to whom he was apprenticed in London. As a member of the London militia sent to oppose the forces of King Charles I, he was shot at Newbury but managed to survive. Armed with knowledge of the properties of plants and herbs such as angelica, goosewort, pilewort, borage, bryony, and tansy, Culpeper went on to outrage the College of Physicians by publishing a book which made public many of their remedies hitherto considered secret. Benjamin Woolley has researched his subject throroughly to provide a fascinating story of a truculent man, and of a turbulent period in English history, while emphasising the vital importance of herbalism amongst citizens constantly under threat from plague and other diseases. An engaging biography. (Kirkus UK)

Kathryn Hughes, New Statesman
'A fascinating, brilliant account of the Renaissance world picture…'

New Scientist
'A remarkable and superbly enjoyable history of the period...riveting.'

Customer Reviews

Alternative medicine? More like alternative biography
Ostensibly this is a biography of Nicholas Culpeper, but I'm not sure this book knows what it wants to be. The author admits as much in the preface, mentioning the dearth of extant biographical material to work with which immediately negates what follows. As the story progresses one then begins to wonder whether this is a history of the English Civil War? or perhaps of the College of Physicians? or perhaps a biography of William Harvey? who features far more frequently than does Culpeper. The language was also a problem for me. The author frequently includes 17th-century prose into the body of the text instead of separating it out which makes for a turgid read with plenty of sub clauses and endless qualifications and meanderings. I'm in favour with quoting from primary sources, and even with the original spellings and grammar, but in moderation and not just for the sake of quoting - for some purpose. Apart from that it's still worth a look.