Culpeper’s English Family Physician · London, 1792
An engraved plant plate and its accompanying text preserve two ways of looking at the same herb.
On this plate, agrimony, archangel, and ground ivy share a sheet. Their stems and leaves spread across the paper, with English and Latin names tucked between them. The engraved lines remain clear against the unevenly toned surface. Beside the plate, the printed description takes the reader from the plant’s appearance and growing place to its “Government and Virtues.”
That last heading is where the planets enter. In Culpeper’s herbal, astrology helped explain a plant’s supposed medicinal properties and the appropriate time to gather it. The book connects herbs with planetary rulers, bringing observations of the garden into the same account as the movements of the heavens. Reading picture and text together makes that relationship especially clear: the plant that can be recognized by its leaves also has a place in an astrological order.
These leaves were printed long after Nicholas Culpeper’s lifetime. He died in 1654; this edition appeared in London in 1792, published by W. Locke. Joshua Hamilton enlarged the herbal with several hundred additional plants, chiefly drawn from Sir John Hill, while retaining an arrangement in Culpeper’s medical and astrological manner. The title, Culpeper’s English Family Physician, preserves his name alongside a substantially later editorial undertaking.
The plates reward attention on their own terms, too. Small flower studies accompany larger plants, and several specimens can occupy one sheet. Turning back to the text changes the pace of looking: names become entries, and entries reveal the assumptions through which earlier readers understood familiar plants.
Our leaves come from an incomplete, damaged first volume, already disbound and lacking its companion volume. The engravings are uncolored. Selected plates are offered with their corresponding text leaf, keeping the image and its description together.