INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Plant, animal and mineral remedies were central to therapeutics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were ‘the principall part of Physick’: they formed a large part of the published medical literature, and they constituted practically the only type of medical information that lay men and women set down on paper. Their numbers were immense: the whole of the natural world seemed to comprise a vast repository of remedies. Scripture gave credence to the Greek and Arabic use of nature for remedies, for as Ecclesiasticus 38.4 put it, ‘The Lord hath created medicines of the earth, and hee that is wise, will not abhorre them’. Plants, especially, seemed to have been God-given to cure or alleviate humankind's ills. A sign of this was that herbals were both botanical (in the post-medieval sense) and medical works: they described plants and also their healing virtues, almost all of them being written by medical practitioners.

Historians have shown how remedies constituted a battleground between differing medical groups, notably Galenists with largely herbal remedies and Paracelsians who advocated chemical medicines. They have also seen remedies as crucial components in the medical marketplace, for they were what apothecaries, quacks and empirics advertised, sold and made their money from, whilst physicians with business links to apothecaries had a financial interest in their patients buying the remedies of their apothecary.