Nicholas Culpeper was the only child of an Anglican minister who died in 1616, just before Nicholas was born.  He was brought up in Sussex, educated - briefly - at Cambridge University, which he left following some scandal involving a woman, and ended up in London, where he was apprenticed to an apothecary.  He died, probably of TB, in 1654, aged 37.

He led, however, an eventful life, not at all confined to the shop.  One the one hand, he was a product of the medical thinking of his time, a mixture of herbalism, alchemy, astrology and religion; on the other, a natural anti-authoritarian, he despised the closed-shop tactics of the powerful Society of Apothecaries, who by all accounts amply illustrated Bernard Shaw's dictum that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity".  Like Beveridge after him, Culpeper saw no reason why a man's income should dictate his access to medical knowledge and treatment.  Naturally pugnacious (he fought in the Civil War which disposed of Charles I), he took on the medical establishment and set out to publish information which would enable the lay reader, however poor, to take charge of his own health, in so far as he could, given the state of medical knowledge at that time:  hence his Herbal, which is still in print to this day.  It was not the first of its kind, but it was the first deliberately aimed at a mass readership.  (It only cost 3 pence, "the price of a pound of sweet almonds", confined itself to such remedies as were available in England, and was written in plain, often very direct, English instead of stately Latin.)

Woolley has taken pains to set Culpeper in the context of his time, politically, religiously, socially and medically.  For anyone interested in medical history this is an excellently informative read.

432pp paperback; b/w illus; notes, bibliography and index.