GLISSON, Francis, ed. CULPEPER, Nicholas.

Very rare first English edition of this anatomical treatise on the prevalence of rickets in children, ‘enlarged, corrected, and very much amended throughout’ by the English herbalist, physician and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54), first published 1650 in Latin by Francis Glisson with material by George Bate and Assuerus Regemorter, Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. The preliminary leaves include 3pp. of publisher’s advertisements for books printed by the notorious, radical, Puritan printer Cole, who died by suicide in 1665 (Elizabeth Lane Furdell, ‘‘Reported to be Distracted’: The Suicide of Puritan Entrepeneur Peter Cole’ in The Historian, 66.4 (2000), pp. 772-792). These are for treatises by Culpeper on drugs and midwifery, as well as an astrological ephemeris in which the republican Culpeper predicted the ‘killing of kings’ (as he seemed to in most years), numerous religious works, and, John Ponet’s (1516?-56) anti-tyrannical Short Treatise of Politick Power, first published 1556.  

Rickets is presented as a new disease, unheard of in Europe until recent times; the authors claim to have coined the ‘complacenceous’ Latin term ‘rachitide.’ The first and only obvious sign of Culpeper’s ‘enlargements’ is a long note on another ‘new’ disease, called Polish plica in the original, which is ‘a most loathsome and horrible disease of the Hair, unheard of in former times, bred by modern luxury and excess: it seizeth specially upon Women, and by reason of a viscous venomous humour, glues together … the hair of the head with a prodigious, ugly, folding entanglement, sometimes taking the form of a great Snake,’ etc. Elsewhere he interpolates explanations of obscure medical terms. It is possible that Culpeper was the translator, who is given as ‘Phil. Armin,’ but on the other hand, Cole was notorious for putting Culpeper’s name on works that had little or nothing to do with him (Mary Rhinelander McCarl, ‘Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper … in Seventeenth-Century London’ in Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 13.2 (1996), p. 238).

The text is mainly concerned with establishing the humoral explanations for rickets: whether a ‘cold distemper,’ or ‘moist,’ whether caused by the ‘stupefaction of the spirits,’ and in which major organ it has its origin or ‘first essence.’ The same humoral causes are suggested for the prevalence of the disease in children of a certain age, i.e. not absolute infants but neither ‘elder’ children, attributed to their physical constitutions and the amount of exercise they typically undertake in play, etc. Finally, the authors provide numerous herbal preventatives and cures, mostly enemas and purgatives, as well as ‘artificial hanging of the body’ and rubbing of the joints by the nurse. The woodcut diagrams illustrate the deformities of bones in the legs, ribs and spine, and illustrate the boots and leg-splints that are used to treat the former. It is easy to see why this text would have interested Culpeper, who had originally rejected Galenism in favour of Paracelsian, astrological medicine, but had, by this later stage of his life, become at least partially reconciled to the Galenic humoral system.

Charles Woodward was rector of Creeting All Saints, Suffolk, educated at Cambridge where he took his MA in 1639. Over sixty books with his signature, or that of his father John, an attorney, survive in the library of Belton House in Lincolnshire (BOO).