Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654): London’s first general practitioner?

Nicholas Culpeper is often regarded as an ill-disciplined, maverick, mid-17th century herbalist and the father of contemporary alternative medicine. There are elements of this statement that have some truth but to dismiss his contribution to the development of health provision in London at the time would be a great injustice. Culpeper did not complete his apprenticeship as an apothecary and was not a formally trained physician, but he developed a clinical practice for the poor of London, indistinguishable from the role of the present day general practitioner. Observers at the time recognised his concern and compassion and his commitment to treat the whole patient and not just the disease. His enduring contribution was his translation from Latin of the physicians’ Pharmacopoeia Londinensis which could be regarded as the first major step towards the demystification of medicine. Culpeper’s London Dispensatory and the many other medical treatises that followed were affordable and widely available to the common man. Culpeper antagonised both apothecaries and physicians because he breached the regulations of the day by accepting patients directly. So perhaps Culpeper was, de facto, London’s first general practitioner, at least 150 years before the role was formally recognised in the Apothecaries Act 1815.