History of Herbs :: Britain
Isle of Gardens
The mass printing of herbals after 1450 made once exclusive medical knowledge available to all those that could read.
While a large portion of the population was illiterate, England’s university trained physicians were shaken enough to lobby
the British Court to restrict the practice of medicine solely to them. In 1511, King Henry VIII decreed that only trained
physicians or apprenticed barber-surgeons could practice within England’s borders. Folk healers were forbidden from working
unless they could pass the Bishop of London’s medical exam, which was given in Latin. Since this was essentially an
impossibility, these midwives and herbalists became the rhizotomoi of their day; they collected rhizomes to sell to
pharmacists and physicians and took their herbal art underground.
The effect of Henry’s edict was a shortage of doctors. In 1543, he rescinded his initial order and declared that all subjects with knowledge of herbs should practice their art without fear of recrimination. The Herbalists Charter as it was called combined with Paracelsus’ discovery of the dose-response relationship saved many country practitioners from accusations of witchcraft. While the ban was still in effect, two folk herbals were published anonymously. Bancke’s Herball in 1525 was a compilation of traditional English lore and the first printed in English. The Grete Herball, printed one year later, was translated from French and German texts.
William Turner published A New Herball in installments beginning in 1551. Turner is considered the father of British botany and the release of his book set off a firestorm of new books on the subject. Rembert Dodoens, a physician/botanist, published a Dutch herbal in 1554, which was translated into Latin in 1583. Master surgeon and court physician to King James I, John Gerard reworked Dodoens’ herbal and described plants and where they could be found in his Hernerall Historie of Plantei in 1597. King James’ apothecary, John Parkinson, examined the use of almost 4,000 species in his Theatrum Botanicum in 1690. Parkinson categorized his entries into 17 classes. The classification system was improved upon in the 18th century by Carl Linne, a Swedish naturalist who used reproductive characteristics as criterion. Plants and animals are still classed according to the Latin genus-species system, also called the Linnaeus method.
Even though the Herbalists Charter had been proclaimed in 1543 and herbal simples were championed by physicians such as Paracelsus, university trained physicians were still publicly dismissive of wise women and continued to treat their high society patients with complicated concoctions often prepared with toxic metals. In 1652, Nicholas Culpepper blasted against this way of thinking with The Complete Herbal and English Physician.
Culpepper was
either beloved or berated. An aristocrat by birth, he had been educated at Cambridge and could read both Greek and Latin,
but after the death of his love he chose to leave school and become and apothecary’s assistant. This social step down
allowed him to come in closer contact with the average citizen, observe their specific ailments, and learn their folk ways.
In his book, he provided astrological connotations for various plants and endorsed the theory that for every illness nature
had provided a remedy waiting to be discovered.
Culpepper, a Puritan, lived in Spitalfields, England during the Civil War waged between Oliver Cromwell and King Charles I. He naturally supported the anti-monarchy Cromwell and was outraged at the substandard medical care that the predominantly Puritan lower classes received. To make over 1,600 simples available to a larger majority, he translated Pharmacopoiea from Latin to English, entitling it The London Dispensatory and Physical Directory. From his own apothecary, he treated the poor, often for free and spoke out openly against the College of Physicians and their continued use of galencials.
Culpepper’s detractors point to his overzealousness in recommending every plant for every ill and his use of astrology, even though the subject was still taught at universities of the day. This optimistic hope of finding cures in nature led to the founding of botanical and physic gardens across Europe. Sections of the garden at Oxford date back to 1621 and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh, Scotland began blooming in 1699. John Evelyn, a landscape gardener, was inspired by the Chelsea Physic Garden to write Acetaria, a Discourse of Sallets in 1699 in which he encouraged the use of herbs in cooking.
The scientific fields of pharmacology and chemistry were beginning to gain popularity over the Doctrine of Signatures by the end of the 1700s. Dr. William Withering, who was privy to the secrets of a wise woman’s remedy for heart ailments, identified the active herb as foxglove and began using it to treat congestive heart failure. Foxglove is the organic source of the modern heart drug digitalis. Organic chemists began extracting active constituents from medicines and apothecaries stocked their shelves with these often-toxic chemicals.
Through the Victorian era, little advancement was made, though the homeopathic Law of Similars was espoused by the German physician/chemist Christian Samuel Hahnemann. The law stated that small amounts of substances could be used to cure the illnesses that the substance created. Modern vaccinations, such as small pox, follow this law by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body, which then causes the immune system to fight it thus building a tolerance and resistance to the full-blown disease.
For a time, botanical remedies took a back seat to chemical remedies. Today there is renewed interest among the general population in this more natural and often less toxic form of healing. Nevertheless, one way should not be pitted against the other; it would be counter productive and dangerous to ignore scientific knowledge and understanding as applied to the ancient art of herbal healing.
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