Corrupt Medical System

The happenings and subsequent outcry which must have preceded the introduction of this Bill have tempted modern herbal enthusiasts to apply the tag about history repeating itself to conditions hedging the treatment of disease in our own times ! However this may be, the unofficial healer of to-day has not yet obtained his Charter from the Tudor king's successors, although it may be argued that this would be unnecessary if proper recognition of King Henry's Act, still part of the present law of the land, could be enforced.

The first name to be associated with herbal practice and to be attached to writings on the subject is that of Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), the "father" of medical herbalism. This son of the Rev. Thomas Culpeper, M.A., Rector of Oakley, Surrey, was by no means the untutored hind he is alleged to be by uninformed or biased critics. Although his system is regarded by the health philosopher of our day as "Culpeperism" rather than medical herbalism as we know it, the independently-minded Nicholas was probably the equal of his more orthodox contemporaries whether judged from the general cultural standpoint or by the results of his curative methods.

A piquant position arose as long after Culpeper's death as the year 1802. In this year a Dr. George Alexander Gordon, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, had published an edition of Culpeper's Herbal or English Physician, in which he claimed a medical degree for its distinguished author ! That a fellow of Britain's foremost medical college should bestow such a dignity upon such a staunch medical libertarian is remarkable and even amusing.

It is slyly hinted in some quarters that Edinburgh University, a comparatively progressive institution in the eighteenth century, conferred a posthumous degree upon Culpeper. Whether this theory is correct, or whether Gordon's strange fervour for Culpeper caused the doctor to foist such a "quack" upon his alma mater has never been satisfactorily settled.

A preface addressed by Nicholas Culpeper to students of physic appears in the original edition of the Herbal, published in 1652. The following are the concluding words, evidence of broad humanitarian sympathies and zeal in the search for truth : "What remains but that you labour to glorify God in your several places, and do good yourselves first by increasing your knowledge, and to your neighbours afterwards by helping their infirmities ; some such, I hope, this nation is worthy of, and to all such I will be a friend during life, ready of my poor power to help."

English herbalism produced few prominent personalities during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the art was widely practised during this period by many humble exponents. The story is transferred to what is now the United States of America. Doubtless the good ship Mayflower carried passengers who understood the medicinal virtues of plants, for a descendant of these men bore the most honoured name in the practice of herbal healing - that of Samuel Thomson.

Thomson (1769-1843), although almost entirely "self-taught," was the man who, by his writings and untiring practical work became the prime mover in the formation of botanical societies and ultimately of State-recognized medical colleges at which Physio-Medicalism (the was nameby which Thomson's system became known) was taught. An outstanding feature of the Thomsonian theory and practice is that poisonous plants are rigorously banned. There would seem to be one main reason for the "uneducated" Thomson's success in breaking through the powerful American medical monopoly - the harmless herbal medicines alone contained in the physio-medical materia medica, and on which the whole therapy was based, must have cured where the methods of allopathy failed. Their superiority could not, indeed, have been other than overwhelming in order to have forced such a victory. All this,however, was not achieved by Thomson without great personal sacrifice. He was persecuted for many years, and actually imprisoned before his final triumph brought State recognition to his teachings.