whats growing in the garden....medicines?

My wee seedlings that have been still for so long have grown in the last four days! Spring is beginning to seep into the days. As I watered my gardens a term came into my mind 'physick garden'. So in my developing researching before doubting mode, i found that these were gardens in Europe created by apothecaries to teach their apprentices plant identification and give them a connection to the plants. Learning gardens.Theres a garden like this that was established in Chelsea in 1673 thats still growing! How cool is that. Mind you indigenous folks earth gardens have been going way longer. But when these gardens were all the rage hospitals had them, damn sensible, as did private estates, damn sensible. Heres to physic gardens in every home and place of healing!


While Im on this era, about 50 years prior actually, Ill quote from Nicholas Culpeper.He was the first apothecary to translate the pharmacoepia (list of herbs in use) from the Latin into english so your everyday folk could access the information. Along the way came some scathing words for the medical establishment.
"It seems the College hold a strange opinion that it would do an English man mischief to know what the herbs in his garden are good for."
At the time the Colleges descriptions of English herbs listed neither their common names or virtues.
"I would consider what number of poor creatures perish daily who else might happily be preserved if they knew what the Herbs in their own Gardens were good for." He was an eat your weeds kinda bloke, whereas the establishment of the time liked to use complex mixtures of exotic and expensive ingredients...

Nicholas is also known for his combining of astrology with herbs. He ascribed symptoms, body parts and herbs to astrological houses and then used either herbs from an opposite house, or sympatheticly ones from the same house to treat disease.
"He that would know the reason of the operation of the Herbs, must look up as high as the stars."
Love how he capitalises Herbs...he was trying to construct a system of understanding health that could be accessible to many rather than the few. His English Physician containinng "a Compleat Method of Practice of Physic, whereby a Man may preserve his Body in Health, or cure himself when sick, with such things one-ly as grown in England, they being most fit for english Bodies." Local plants, used one at a time as simples.

Resources:
Planetary planting: A Guide to Organic Growing by the Signs of the Zodiac by Louise Riotte
Green Pharmacy : The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine by Barbara Grigg