Culpeper's Medicine, notes

While Montana and I were in a used bookstore in Hoboken, I picked up a copy of "Culpeper's Medicine: A Practise of Western Holistic Medicine", which has been donated to the store posthumously. The book is focused on introducing the life works of Nicholas Culpeper, a 17th-century herbalist, to modern audiences.

Culpeper, while working with many folk remedies, based his prescriptions on experiment and reason (with a fair amount of alchemy, of course). The following information are notes based upon this book, and may or may not reflect the whole of classical medicine.

The Four Elements, their Primary Qualities, and their Associated Temperaments:

• Fire: Hot & Dry; Choleric
• Air: Hot & Moist; Sanguine
• Water: Cold & Moist; Phlegmatic
• Earth: Cold & Dry; Melancholic

The Four Primary Qualities' Secondary Qualities

• Hot: Active, renders Dryness; dispersive
  
• Cold: Active, renders Coldness; aggregative
  
• Dry: Passive, able to be compacted, resistant, and binding; resistant
  
• Moist Passive, able to be pliable and yielding; receptive

"The ideal state [of the human body] existed when the primary qualities with perfectly balanced with no one predominating." (Tobyn)

Culpeper argued that this was once the state of man, but then corrupted by original sin. Had perfect harmony of the elements been maintained, "how could there be motrality?" Pretty groovy!

Any elemental excess (or, stated more loquaciously, a deviation from the Golden Mean) will result in a multitude a physiological symptoms: "grossness, thinness, fleshiness, leanness, fatness, hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, all of these swerve from meanness". Thus, the primary qualities must be kept in careful check! Each primary quality (being hot, cold, dry, and moist) must be in balance with another set of primary qualities. In short:

• An 'active' primary quality must be balanced with both of the 'passive' primary qualities; and
• a 'passive' primary quality must be balance with both of the 'active' primary qualities.
• If an 'active' primary quality is in excess, it will further induce an excess of a 'passive' primary quality; and
  
• if a 'passive' primary quality is in excess, it will further induce an excess of an 'active' primary quality.

thus:

• An excess of heat will induce dryness
• An excess of cold will induce moisture
• An excess of dryness will induce cold
• An excess of moisture will also induce cold
  

"The concusion drawn from these alterations of simple into compound imbalances was that heat stood as the quality most favourable for maintaining the proper balance and general health of the body, particularly when heat was tempered by the correct amount and quality of moisture (the qualities of the element Air)."

Culpeper has now not only suggested that we need air, but a certain quality of it, as well! The Primary qualities--which turn out to be qualitative, conveniently enough--were "calculated by degree", numbered 1 through 4.

• 1st degree of heat: human body average; sugar
• 2nd and 3rd degree of heat: moderate fever
• 4th degree of heat: burning fever; garlic and pepper
• 2nd degree of cold: lettuce and cucumber
  

So, there you have the alchemical significance of the coolness of cucumbers.

Tobyn, Graem. Culpepper's Medicine, A Practice of Western Holistic Medicine. Rockport, MA: Element Books, Inc, 1997.