The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley

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       Knightrider Street, South of St Paul’s Cathedral (‘Poles church’), as shown on late 16th century ‘Agas’ map of London.

      He presumably turned up at the College unarmed, and, being a stickler for decorum, dressed respectfully (but not fashionably – he disliked fashion, considering it a ‘redundant covering, a fantastic arrangement’).²⁶ He was the only candidate to be interviewed that day, leaving plenty of time for a rigorous examination. There were four parts, usually conducted over three or four separate sessions, all based on the works of Galen. They covered physiology, pathology (the symptoms, ‘signs’ and causes of disease), methods of treatment, and ‘materia medica’ (pharmacy). Examinees were then given three questions chosen at random by the President, and asked to cite passages in the works of Galen that answered them. The entire proceedings were conducted orally in Latin.²⁷

      Being his first appearance, Harvey was probably examined on physiology and, thanks to his time at Padua, was likely to have acquitted himself well. It would be nearly a year before he was next examined, perhaps to give him a chance to gain some practical experience and bone up on the seventeen Galenic treatises on the College’s reading list. He faced the Censors three times in 1604: on 2 April, 11 May, and finally on 7 August, when he was elected a candidate. This meant he was free to practise and, after four years, would become a full Fellow.

      Harvey climbed London’s monumental medical hierarchy with the deftness of a steeplejack. Four months after becoming a candidate, he married Elizabeth, the daughter of a former College Censor and royal physician, Dr Lancelot Browne. Very little is known about Elizabeth, not even the year of her death, which was some time between 1645 and 1652. She apparently bore no children, and contemporaries who wrote about Harvey do not even mention her. Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, published five years after Harvey’s death, described him as ‘living a Batchelor’.²⁸ Harvey never wrote about Elizabeth, except in connection with her pet parrot. He evidently spent hours resentfully scrutinizing the creature, ‘which was long her delight’, noting how it had ‘grown so familiar that he was permitted to walk at liberty through the whole house’.

      Where he missed his Mistress, he would search her out, and when he had found her, he would court her with cheerful congratulation. If she had called him, he would make answer, and flying to her, he would grasp her garments with his claws and bill, till by degrees he had scaled her shoulder … Many times he was sportive and wanton, he would sit in her lap, where he loved to have her scratch his head, and stroke his back, and then testify his contentment, by kind mutterings and shaking of his wings.

      The flirtations finally ceased when the bird ‘which had lived many years, grew sick, and being much oppressed by many convulsive motions, did at length deposit his much lamented spirit in his Mistress’s bosom, where he had so often sported’. Harvey exacted his revenge on the pampered pet by performing a prompt dissection. Perhaps because of its adoring relationship with his wife, he had assumed it to be a cock, so was surprised to discover a nearly fully formed egg in its ‘womb’.²⁹

      Elizabeth’s influential father wasted no time in trying to advance his new son-in-law’s career. In 1605, he heard that the post of physician at the Tower of London was about to come vacant and wrote at least twice on Harvey’s behalf to the King’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, once in haste from an apothecary’s shop in Fenchurch Street, where he was presumably ordering up prescriptions. The application failed, but by 1609, his son-in-law was sufficiently well placed with the royal household to receive a letter of recommendation from the King proposing Harvey for the post of hospital physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Spitalfields. St Bart’s (as it was and still is known) was one of only two general hospitals in London that survived the Reformation, the other being St Thomas’s in Southwark (Bethlehem Hospital, or ‘Bedlam’, north of Bishopsgate, was a lunatic asylum). Its role was to offer hospitality, including free medical care, to London’s poor ‘in their extremes and sickness’. This was an immense task at a time when London’s population was ravaged by some of the highest mortality rates in the country, and swelled by influxes of migrants. St Bart’s had around two hundred beds, cared for by a ‘hospitaler’ (a cleric, who also acted as gatekeeper), a matron, twelve nursing sisters, and three full-time surgeons. The physician’s job was to visit the hospital at least one day a week, usually a Monday, when a crowd of patients would await him in the cloister, ready to be assessed and treated when necessary. In return, he was provided with lodgings, a salary of £25 a year (approximately four times the annual living costs of a tradesman such as a miller or blacksmith) plus 40s. for the all-important livery of office.СКАЧАТЬ