Nicholas Culpeper

Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654) was an English herbalist, physician and astrologer. The son of a clergyman, he left Cambridge without a degree after a personal tragedy, apprenticed to an apothecary and set up practice in Spitalfields, where he treated the London poor for little or nothing. He fought and was wounded on the parliamentary side in the Civil War. His unauthorized English translation of the College of Physicians' Latin pharmacopoeia in 1649 enraged the profession, and his Complete Herbal of 1653, which matched plants to planets and ailments in plain English, has been reprinted continuously ever since. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight.