CULPEPER, Nicholas (1616-1654).
The English Physitian: or an Astrologo-physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation being a compleat method of physick, whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, being Sick.
London: Peter Cole, 1652.
Folio (10-1/2 x 7 inches): engraved portrait frontispiece of Culpeper by Thomas Cross, one diagram in the text (a bit browned throughout, edges a little frayed, outer margin of leaf 2G1 (i.e. pp. 201-202) torn with loss affecting some marginal text on verso). Bound in contemporary panelled sheep (rebacked to style).
PROVENANCE: early pen trials on inside front cover, frontispiece captioned "Coxcombe by Authority"; "Mr. Forman Book 1798" on recto of first blank; an early 19th-century ALS from one Jane Williams of Epsom, to Thomas Sewell Esq., of Bookham, Surrey, concerning the sale of some items.
First edition of Culpeper's magnum opus. As the title states, it cost threepence and listed "such things only as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies". The book provides, in English, a comprehensive list of native medicinal plants, complete with an index of typical illnesses, "using an astrological, rather than Galenic, approach (of the kind still flourishing in popular British culture), and set out in a straightforward and frank style. It sold widely at the time, and there have been over one hundred subsequent editions, including fifteen before 1700. (One edition of 1708 was printed in Boston, Massachusetts; it and the translated Pharmacopoeia, printed in 1720, were the first medical books published in North America.). It would be hard to overstate Culpeper's importance for the medical practice and health education (in the widest sense) of his time and place-far greater, according to one authority, than either William Harvey's or Thomas Sydenham's (see Poynter, "Nicholas Culpeper and his books," pp. 152-3). He not only brought a relatively sophisticated and cheap traditional system of remedies-of the kind sometimes now described as 'holistic', with the emphasis on prevention and the gentle treatment of chronic functional disorders-within the reach of the semi-literate majority of the population; he also put the orthodox medicine of his day, alongside the latest thinking (such as Paracelsian 'chymical or spagirical' medicine), into the realm of public discourse" (Patrick Curry for DNB).
REFERENCES: ESTC R24897 (locates five copies in the U.K., seven in the U.S.); Wing C7501; Henrey 53 and pp 82-88; Norman 541; Poynter, "Nicholas Culpeper and his books", Journal of the History of Medicine 17, pp. 152-67.
Comparable: Sotheby’s, 2013 - £5,000 ($7,700)