About Nicholas Culpeper...

"Gather all Leaves in the hour of that Planet that governs them." ~ Nicholas Culpeper

Nicholas Culpeper, born October 18,1616 – died January 10, 1654, was an English botanist, herbalist, physician, and astrologer. His published books, The English Physitian (1652) and the Complete Herbal (1653), contain a rich store of pharmaceutical and herbal knowledge. (Please click on the links provided to have access to both of his works online.)

Per wikipedia:

...Culpeper spent the greater part of his life in the English outdoors cataloguing hundreds of medicinal herbs. He criticized what he considered the unnatural methods of his contemporaries, writing: "This not being pleasing, and less profitable to me, I consulted with my two brothers, DR. REASON and DR. EXPERIENCE, and took a voyage to visit my mother NATURE, by whose advice, together with the help of Dr. DILIGENCE, I at last obtained my desire; and, being warned by MR. HONESTY, a stranger in our days, to publish it to the world, I have done it."[1]...

Culpeper was the son of Nicholas Culpeper (Senior), a clergyman. He studied at Cambridge, and afterwards became apprenticed to an apothecary. After seven years his master absconded with the money paid for the indenture, and soon after this, Culpeper's mother died of breast cancer.[2] Culpeper married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, which allowed him to set up a pharmacy in the halfway house in Spitalfields, London, outside the authority of the City of London at a time when medical facilities in London were at breaking point. Arguing that "no man deserved to starve to pay an insulting, insolent physician", and obtaining his herbal supplies from the nearby countryside, Culpeper was able to provide his services for free. This, and a willingness to examine patients in person rather than simply examining their urine (in his opinion, "as much piss as the Thames might hold" did not help in diagnosis), Culpeper was extremely active, sometimes seeing as many as forty people in one morning. Using a combination of experience and astrology, Culpeper devoted himself to using herbals to treat the illnesses of his patients.

...Culpeper attempted to make medical treatments more accessible to layperson by educating them about maintaining their health. Ultimately his ambition was to reform the system of medicine by questioning traditional methods and knowledge and exploring new solutions for ill health. The systematization of the use of herbals by Culpeper was a key development in the evolution of modern pharmaceuticals, most of which originally had herbal origins.[3]

Culpeper's emphasis on reason rather than tradition is reflected in the introduction to his Complete Herbal, though his definition of reason was not that different from the Romantic philosophies of the era presenting nature as refuge. Culpepper paired the plants and diseases with planetary influences, countering illnesses with nostroms that were paired with an opposing planetary influence....

For more info & a natal chart of Nicholas Culpeper - please check out Astro.com's post about him.