(From an old book of his.)
This passage is not selected as a favourable specimen of Culpepper’s pharmaceutical skill, but as a sample of the manner in which he often rates “the College.” His own opinions are open to quite as severe criticism. A large part of his lore is astrological; and he is very confident about the doctrine of signatures. But he knew herbs well, and his general advice is sound.
Perhaps many of those who have studied his works have formed the idea that he was a bent old man with a long grey beard, who busied himself with the collection of simples. He was, in fact, a soldier, and died at the early age of 38. His portraits and the descriptions of him by his astrological friends represent him as a smart, brisk young Londoner, fluent in speech and animated in gesture, gay in company, but with frequent fits of melancholy, an extraordinarily good conceit of himself, and plenty of reason for it.
Culpepper’s House.
(From an old book of his.)
Culpepper lived in the stirring times of the Civil War, and fought on one side or the other, it is not certain which. Most likely, judging from the frequent pious expressions in his works, he was a Parliamentarian. He was severely wounded in the chest in one of the battles, but it is not known in which. It is probable that it was this wound which caused the lung disease from which he died.
Such information as we have of Culpepper’s career is gathered from his own works, and from some brutal attacks on him in certain public prints. He describes himself on the title-pages of some of his big books as “M.D.,” but there is no evidence that he ever graduated. He lived, at least during his married life, at Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, and there he carried on his medical practice. Probably it was a large one, for he evidently understood the art of advertising himself. He claims to have been the only doctor in London at the time who gave advice gratis to the poor, and his frequent comments on the cost of the pharmacopœia preparations suggest that the majority of his patients were not of the fashionable class.
Nicholas Culpepper was apprenticed to an apothecary in Great St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and at the same time a certain Marchmont Nedham was a solicitor’s clerk in Jewry Street. Nedham became the most notorious journalist in England, and founded and edited in turn the Mercurius Britannicus, an anti-royalist paper, the Mercurius Pragmaticus, violently anti-Commonwealth, and the Mercurius Politicus, subsidised by Cromwell’s government, and supervised by Mr. John Milton. This publication, amalgamated with the Public Intelligencer, its principal rival, has descended to us as the London Gazette. Probably Nedham and Culpepper were friends in their early days, and they may have been comrades in arms when the war broke out. But evidently they became fierce enemies later. In Mercurius Pragmaticus Nedham, pretending to review Culpepper’s translation of the official Dispensatory, takes the opportunity of pouring on him a tirade of scurrilous abuse. The translation, he says, “is filthily done,” which was certainly not true. This is the only piece of criticism in the article. The rest deals with the author personally. Nedham informs his readers that Culpepper was the son of a Surrey parson, “one of those who deceive men in matters belonging to their most precious souls.” That meant that he was a Nonconformist. Nicholas himself, according to Nedham, had been an Independent, a Brownist, an Anabaptist, a Seeker, and a Manifestationist, but had ultimately become an Atheist. During his apprenticeship “he ran away from his master upon his lewd debauchery”; afterwards he became a compositor, then a “figure-flinger,” and lived about Moorfields on cozenage. After making vile insinuations about his wife, Nedham states that by two years’ drunken labour Culpepper had “gallimawfred the Apothecaries’ Book into nonsense”; that he wore an old black coat lined with plush which his stationer (publisher) had got for him in Long Lane to hide his knavery, having been till then a most despicable ragged fellow; “looks as if he had been stued in a tanpit; a frowzy headed coxcomb.” He was aiming to “monopolise to himself all the knavery and cozenage that ever an apothecary’s shop was capable of.”
Culpepper’s works answer this spiteful caricature, for at any rate he must have been a man of considerable attainments, and of immense industry. That his writings acquired no little popularity is best proved by the fact that after his death it was good business to forge others somewhat resembling them and pass them off as his.