Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to the PeopleHarper Collins, 29 juin 2004 - 402 pages The first full biography of Nicholas Culpeper, the English seventeenth-century pioneer of herbal medicine whose actions and beliefs revolutionized medicine and medical practice In the mid-seventeenth century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war that 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; and infant mortality rates that emptied crowded households of their 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 as an herbalist -- and as a revolutionary. 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 became part of the revolution that toppled a monarchy. In a spellbinding narrative of impulse, romance and heroism, Benjamin Woolley vividly re-creates these momentous struggles and the roots of today's hopes and fears about the power of medical science, professional institutions and government. Heal Thyself tells the story of a medical rebel who took on the authorities and paid the price. |
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... the place where the first family members settled, perhaps Gollesberghe in Sandwich, Kent or Cul- spore in Hastings, Sussex. To most, however, it was more suggestive of politics than geography. 'Cole' was a prefix meaning a.
... politics than geography. 'Cole' was a prefix meaning a fraud, as in cole-prophet, a false prophet, or 'Colle tregetour', a magician or trickster mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poem The House of Fame.5 Colepeper, one of innumerable ...
... political controversies, tobacco was associated with intellectual ones as well. Critics disapprovingly noted that the herb carried the endorsement of philosophers such as Giambattista della Porta. Della Porta's Natural Magick (first ...
... political, and philosophical, as well as recreational, trip. This made it all the more appealing to a young Cambridge undergraduate with a curious mind and a full pocket. It was also the reason why the university authorities tried to ...
... political influence, at least by the standards of the time. They could vote in elections for the Common Council, the City's parliament, and through their guilds controlled the City's administration: the Court of Aldermen and the Lord ...
Table des matières
Lesser Celandine Pilewort | 263 |
Arrach Wild Stinking | 303 |
Wormwood | 335 |
Epilogue | 349 |
notes | 353 |
bibliography | 377 |
index | 393 |
Hemlock | 235 |
Autres éditions - Tout afficher
Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to ... Benjamin Woolley Aucun aperçu disponible - 2004 |