NICHOLAS CULPEPER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21136, 19 March 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

NICHOLAS CULPEPER.

DOCTOR AND ASTROLOOER. BY KOTARE. An old book has always fascinated me, especially one that carries tho markings of previous readers. I have a 1613 copy of tho Authorised Version of the Bible, which a dozen different owners during the last three hundred years have adorned with their names and .birth-dates, and whose text has been copiously annotated in a dozen different hands. It could tell a strange story of its devious Odyssey from the day it left the hands of Robert Barker, printer to tho King's Most Excellent Majesty, to the day I picked it up in a New Zealand second-hand shop. Through the kindness of a friend I have had the privilege of studying the first edition of the medical works of Nicholas Culpeper, most famous of English herbalists and astrologers. The book is well-thumbed. If many a devout Englishman has turned the pages of my old Bible in periods of national distress or deep anxiety about his soul, still more hands have sought in Culpeper the knowledge that would relieve the toothache or tho gout, or would give immunity against tho ever-present danger of the plague. To-day tho book is consulted purely as a curiosity, a mine of quaint lore long superseded in the march of progress; but these same pages have been eagerly scanned by eyes blurred with pain, or seeing dimly through anxious tears. It is something like .walking over an old battlefield; the stress and the strain, the devotion and the fears have left no mark 011 the landscape. Men suffered and died where you move from tragic point to point, mildly curious to reconstruct a piece of dead history or concerned only to add to your list another famous place that you havo seen. That is natural enough. We continue to live only because time blunts the poignancy of our own griefs; it is more than folly to try to feel again the stab of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. The Man. Still it is with something more than idle curiosity that one handles a book like this first edition of Culpeper's accumulated wisdom. The man himself is extraordinarily interesting. The face that looks out at me as I read is dark, eager, dominant. Quack though he is by our standards, he loved his art and believed in it, and what is more, he loved his fellow men. He is a patriot too. He does not see why England should go abroad for medical knowledge. The English body has been developed in the English atmosphere, has been built up by the elements England has provided. English soil, therefore, is likely to produce the medicines that 'will do most good to Englishmen. Why seek drugs in the Indies when your little kitchen garden will offer English cures for, the ills of English bodies? Insular and parochial if you like, but I find myself admiring the man for it. I judge that Kipling has found great delight in the study of Culpeper. In his " Rewards and Fairies " he brings him to life to show him fighting the plague. Culpeper died in 1654, eleven yeare before the outbreak of the plague that swept England and for several grim months filled the night streets of London with the rumble of the death-carts and the bellman's ghastly cry, " Bring out your dead." Kipling pictures Culpeper reaching a sound conclusion from false premises. He studies the stars and finds what woman's instinct had discovered thousands of years before, that the rat is an enemy of the human race. He gets the public to work chasing rats. To kill the rats, they have to clean up the places where the rat breeds. So Culpeper strikes a first blow at the cause of the plague. Kipling imagines him as the father of modern preventive medicine, the first to abandon the treatment of symptoms and to concentrate on the conditions that encourage the development of disease. -There is not much in the recorded achievements of Culpeper to warrant Kipling's high eulogy; but you cannot read his book even at this late day without receiving tho impact of a virile, energetic, forceful personality Enemies. Culpeper had the misfortune to arouse the deep hostility of two influential sections of the seventeenth century public. He gathered and published the medicinal lore of the day. The whole band of apothecaries, who had surrounded their work with appropriate mystery, objected to the broadcasting of their trade secrets. Culpeper was well able to take care of himself. Ho was a fighter by instinct, and in spite of all the flummeries of the astrology he linked up with his medical practice, he hated humbug and mystification. What he thought he said with emphasis. The preface to his works a period of exile following a duel in which he winged his man. hrom his sanctuary abroad he prescribed for his victim and paid his medical expenses until he recovered. In addition, Culpeper was a strong Puritan. He fought for tho Parliament against the king, and his life was shortened through the wounds received on campaign. He seems to have "been exceedingly devout, and nevef- treated a patient without trying first to set his mind at rest 011 religious matters. He was always trailing his coat for the divines; for lie loved a theological debate even more than medical controversy. Yet when his grandfather, a distinguished cleric, offered to make him his heir if he would study for the Church he debonairly turned his back on fortune and the chance of ecclesiastical preferment. His works contain an elaborate horoscope cast by a leading astrologer, John Gadbury. Ifere it is noted that he will always be afflicted by consumption of the purse. That certainly was one of his chief troubles. He refused to take fees from the poor, and devoted most, of his income to indiscriminate charity. The Puritan. In the days before he was a staunch Puritan, while still a student at Cambridge, he decided to solve all his financial problems by eloping with an heiress. Our own Wakefield was to try the same plan two hundred years later. The lady was willing and set out for the rendezvous on the appointed day. " But this happiness was denied them by the malevolence of Mars and some other envious planets." The lady was caught in a thunderstorm and struck dead by lightning. One reads between the lines that the profound melancholy that marked his periods of depression after seasons of exceptional vivacity, and the piety that marked all his later days, date from this bitter experience. His methods of treatment are fully expounded in his " School of Physick, a work very necessary for all that desire to be rightly informed in Physick, Chyrurgery, Chymistry, etc." These methods might not win the approval of the 8.M.A., but they are so, full of interest on the human and historical side that I shall-summarise them in a further article.