The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom

The father of alternative medicine or a dishonest quack? A principled revolutionary or an immoral agitator?

Who, Benjamin Woolley asks, was the real Nicholas Culpeper? How did he have the brashness to challenge the medical and political establishments of the mid seventeenth century, the courage to speak out against the authority of both the College of Physicians and the government of Charles I?

Woolley’s Culpeper is a man as fiery and complex as the times in which he lived, a cipher of the English Civil War, a lusty, bawdy outlaw, inhabiting the underground world of religious sects, secret printing presses and unlicensed apothecary shops. In a spellbinding narrative of impulse, romance and heroism, Woolley recreates the momentous struggles that still define our understanding of both the power and limitations of medical science.