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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      They did not do a very good job of it. In 1614, a group of Fellows were appointed to produce a draft. Two years later, on 14 September 1616, a meeting was called to review progress. It turned out that very little work had been done. Papers were missing, and there were complaints that the Fellows given the task ‘went away leaving the matter unfinished’.³⁵ After bouts of recrimination, another committee, with Harvey probably among its members, was set up to complete the project. A year later, it was sufficiently advanced for a draft to be handed to a delegation of apothecaries for consultation – a rare moment of cooperation between the two bodies. In January 1618, the publisher John Marriot was given permission to register the title with the Stationers’ Company, giving him an exclusive right to sell the work on the College’s behalf. Marriot would go on to publish the likes of John Donne, but at the time of his appointment by the College, he had only recently set up shop at the sign of the White Flower de Luce, in St Dunstan’s Churchyard. The College presumably hoped that commercial dependence would make such a callow operator more tractable. They were wrong.

      On 26 April 1618, a royal proclamation was circulated ordering all apothecaries, who were then in the throes of forming their Society, to buy the new book, to be published in Latin under the title Pharmacopoeia Londinensis.36 In May, the more eager and obedient queued up at the sign of the White Flower de Luce to buy copies. Some of these early copies were discovered to have a blank page where the King’s Proclamation should have been and so had to be withdrawn. The Proclamation that appeared in the amended editions was the only section of the book in English, to ensure its message was understood. The King, it announced verbosely, did ‘command all and singular Apothecaries, within this our Realm of ENGLAND or the dominions thereof, that they and every of them, immediately after the said Pharmacopoeia Londin: shall be printed and published: do not compound, or make any Medicine, or medicinal receipt, or praescription; or distil any Oil, or Waters, or other extractions … after the ways or means praescribed or directed, by any other books or Dispensatories whatsoever, but after the only manner and form that hereby is, or shall be directed, praescribed, and set down by the said book, and according to the weights and measures that are or shall be therein limited, and not otherwise &c. upon pain of our high displeasure, and to incur such penalties and punishment as may be inflicted upon Offenders herein for their contempt or neglect of this our royal commandment’.³⁷

      The book was, compared with the continental dispensatories upon which it was modelled, concise and simple. Unfortunately, its ‘manner and form’ was, according to its own authors, defective. The College claimed that Marriot had ‘hurled it into the light’ prematurely. Dr Henry Atkins, the royal physician who had first approached the King about the apothecaries and was now the College’s President, had returned from a trip to the country to find, ‘with indignation’, that the work to which he and the College had ‘devoted so much care … had crept into publicity defiled with so many faults and errors, incomplete and mutilated because of lost and cut off members’.³⁸ A meeting was hastily convened at Atkins’s house, and it was decided that the book should be withdrawn from publication and a new edition issued.

      Marriot published this ‘second endeavour’ in early 1619 (though the publication date remained 1618, to obscure the first endeavour’s existence). The fact that Marriot, rather than another publisher, was selected to do the job seems to contradict the College’s claim, in a new epilogue, that he was to blame for the premature release of the defective first edition. So did the news, reported at a Comitia on 25 September 1618, that Marriot was still awaiting material from the College and that he had been promised a further payment ‘when the corrected book appeared’.³⁹

      An examination of the differences between the two editions confirms that the need for a reissue had little or nothing to do with printing mistakes or the publisher. The second edition is a substantially different work, containing over a third more recipes. And far from eliminating errors, it introduced several of its own. The real reason for the reissue appears to have been an editorial dispute within the College over the contents. The bulk of the recipes it contained were Galenicals – medicines based on Galen’s writings and drawn from ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic pharmacopoeias, most dating back to the early centuries ad. However, ten pages of novel ‘chemical’ medicines were also included. Some of the traditionalists in the College probably objected to this and tried to have them removed, in the process provoking a review of the book’s entire contents. When the College, in a metaphorical frenzy, accused the printer of snatching away the manuscript ‘as a blaze flares up from a fire and in a greedy famine deprives the stomach of its still unprepared food’, it was using him to draw the heat from disputes within its own profession.⁴⁰

      Harvey’s involvement in the drafting of the dispensatory is undocumented. However, he is listed as one of its authors, bearing the title Medicus Regis juratus, which shows that by 1618, aged forty, he had become a member of King James’s medical retinue, placing him near the peak of his profession. However, posterity would remember him not for his dazzling rise, nor for his contribution to the botched Pharmacopoeia, but for another achievement made over this period.

      In 1615, Harvey was appointed the College’s Lumleian Lecturer in Anatomy, succeeding his fellow Censor Dr Thomas Davies, who had held the post since 1607. The lectureship had been founded in 1582 by Lord Lumley to advance England’s ‘knowledge of physic’.⁴¹ Attendance for College Fellows was mandatory, twice a week for an hour through the year, though they came reluctantly, the College at one stage being forced to more than double the fine for nonattendance to 2s. 6d.

      Harvey was well qualified for the post. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was an enthusiastic and unflinching anatomist. At various stages in his career he performed or witnessed dissections of cats, deer, chickens, guinea-pigs, seals, snakes, moles, rats, frogs, fish, pigeons, an ostrich, his wife’s parrot, a pet monkey, a human foetus, his father, and his sister. It has been estimated that he cut up 128 species of animal as well as numerous humans. His autopsies revealed the size of his father’s ‘huge’ colon, his sister’s ‘large’ spleen (which weighed five pounds), and the condition of the genitalia of a man who was claimed to have died at the age of a hundred and fifty-two, which, as Harvey reported to the King, was entirely consistent with a prosecution for fornication the subject had received after turning a hundred.⁴²

      Harvey looked upon anything that moved as potential material, complaining during a journey to the Continent in 1630 that he ‘could scarce see a dog, crow, kite, raven or any bird, or anything to anatomise, only some few miserable people’.⁴³ London in the early seventeenth century would provide a richer source of specimens, both human and animal. The aviary in St James’s Park had ostriches and parrots; merchants arrived from the East Indies with monkeys and snakes; and the streets were packed with a ready supply of feral dogs and cats. He and his colleagues also had access to a supply of human specimens taken from the scaffolds at Tyburn and Newgate, the traditional places of execution. Examining bodies freshly taken down, and noting how they were soaked in urine, he opened them up while the noose was still tight, in the hope of examining the organs before the final signs of life were extinguished.⁴⁴

      Harvey’s Lumleian lectures began in December 1616, and they were masterpieces. His lecture notes have, unlike most of his other papers, survived, proudly introduced by a title-page upon which he inscribed in red ink, in Latin, ‘Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy by me William Harvey, Doctor of London, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery, Anno Domini 1616, aged 37’. Presumably to guard against casual perusal, the notes that follow are written in the barely legible scrawl for which future СКАЧАТЬ