The Complete Herbal

Plants, planetary influences and arguments about medical authority share the pages of Nicholas Culpeper's herbal. In his address to the reader, Culpeper challenges reliance on earlier writers and explains his attempt to connect the properties of herbs with the stars. His forceful, conversational prose brings religious belief, personal experience and criticism of other practitioners into a reference work about plants and their attributed uses.

The illustrated edition includes named plates of British herbs and plants, together with additional material on preparing medicines and an index. In the discussion of wormwood, Culpeper compares varieties, links their supposed effects to the strength of the patient and the place where they grow, and describes a coastal plant's stalks and leaves. Read as a historical source, the book shows how plant observation and theories of the body were combined in an older medical system. Its interest today lies in that record of botanical description, household medicine and astrological reasoning.