Nicholas Culpeper was born on October 28, 1616, at Ockely, Surrey, England, where a Culpeper was in residence as Lord of the Manor.
His paternal family was wealthy and titled, owning castles and manor houses in Kent and Sussex. Culpeper’s father died suddenly thirteen days before Nicholas was born and, for reasons unknown,
Ockley Manor passed into other ownership immediately upon his death. His widow took her infant son and moved to the village of Isfield, where her father, the Reverend William Attersole, recognized the boy’s ability and provided Culpeper with an excellent education in preparation for University.
In addition to overall academic excellence, Culpeper was especially well versed in Latin and Greek, the knowledge of which served him exceedingly well in his later medical studies.
At the age of ten, he became interested in the study of astrology and showed a particular aptitude for it.
College and Apprenticeship
Culpeper briefly attended Cambridge, squandered his inheritance, and at age 23 moved to London to seek his fortune, armed with nothing but a classical education and the clothes on his back.
After marrying fifteen year old Alice Field, an heiress with a considerable fortune, Culpeper apprenticed himself to an apothecary to obtain an income. He displayed an outstanding aptitude for be a “Student of Physick” and applied his ability in classical languages to study and master the Materia Medica in Latin.
Many of the medical lexicons of this time linked herbs with astrology, a subject that Culpeper rekindled and mastered. He was soon to discover that a Student of Physick and a Student of Astrology were often two sides of the same coin.
After setting up his own apothecary shop on Red Lion Street, Culpeper practiced the Art of Physick with an astonishing skill that earned him a stellar reputation. Regarding medicine as a combination of both science and an art, he preferred to treat the poor and charged them little or nothing for his services.
The Horoscope of an Illness
The cornerstone of Culpeper’s trade was the decumbiture, of which the literal definition is “the point of time of invasion of the disease.”
To define this more clearly, the decumbiture occurs when one takes to his or her bed. The exact time is noted and a horoscope is cast. This is the decumbiture, or chart, of the illness. The cause, diagnosis, prognosis and cure, or lack thereof, is present in this chart and thereby most cautiously judged.
Culpeper lectured privately on medicine and linked horoscopes with health to an unusual an unprecedented degree: "We must know that there is a sympathy between Celestial and Terrestrial bodies; which will easily appear, if we consider that the whole of creation is one entire and united body, composed by the power of an All-wise God, of a composition of discords."
The Standard Text
Culpeper translated the complete texts of Materia Medica from Latin into English; studying every known medical text from the time of Galen and Hippocrates up through and including the seventeenth century. This Herculean task took six years to complete, followed by The Complete Herbal and English Physician, the standard herbal in the Western world for over 30 years.
This last text served to make him a legend in his own time. Subsequently plagiarized, it was this book, along with the Bible, that most accompanied the British colonists to the New World. It has been in print for over four hundred years
The aphorism “Physician, heal thyself” proved a cruel irony in Culpeper’s personal life. Alice bore him seven children and only one, a daughter, survived him. He died of tuberculosis at age 38 on January 10, 1564.
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