Culpeper was an herbalist who followed the classical medical precepts of Hippocrates and Galen. A medical populist, Culpeper's mission was to put medicine and natural healing back into the hands of the people. According to Culpeper, priests, lawyers and physicians were, by and large, a burden to society, and used Latin to keep their knowledge out of the hands of the public. A "natural rebel, he was opposed to the doctors monopolising medical practice, to their great profit, through the College of Physicians."
To put medical knowledge and power back into the hands of the people, Culpeper wrote an unauthorized critical translation of The London Dispensatory in English. In so doing, he aroused the enmity of many powerful physicians, who tried to brand him as a quack and charlatan.
Culpeper also translated Galen's Art of Physick from Latin into English. This work deals with the basic tastes, temperatures and energetics of medicinal substances, and how these properties produce the whole range of therapeutic actions associated with them.
A Complete Herbal is Culpeper's treatise and alphabetical catalog of the medicinal plants of his native England, including their astrological correspondences and indications. It is available free online at the link provided.
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