THE HERBALIST: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom - The story of Nicholas Culpeper – legendary rebel, radical, Puritan, and author of the great ‘Herbal’. This is a powerful history of medicine’s first freedom fighter set in London during Britain’s age of revolution.

In the mid-17th century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war which saw levels of slaughter not matched until the Somme, famine in a succession of failed harvests that reduced peasants to 'anatomies', epidemics to rival the Black Death in their enormity, and infant mortality rates that left childless even women who had borne eight or nine children. In the midst of these terrible times came Nicholas Culpeper’s ‘Herbal’ – one of the most popular and enduring books ever published.

Culpeper was a virtual outcast from birth. Rebelling against a tyrannical grandfather and the prospect of a life in the church, he abandoned his university education after a doomed attempt at elopement. Disinherited, he went to London, where he was to find his vocation in instigating revolution.

Condition: Good - Author: Benjamin Woolley - Publisher: Harper Collins - Pages: 402 - Hardback