Flower
power
Born of desperation, the Doctrine
of Signatures was mainstream medicine throughout the 17th century
BY Jackie Rosenhek
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If the average long-suffering patient from
the European Middle Ages were somehow transported to a modern Canadian
hospital, chances are he'd leave happy and
healthy -- though decidedly confused. His
goiters and gout, scurvy and syphilis, pox and pustulences and even
his erectile dysfunction would have been eradicated (or at least
nicely managed) by our awesome arsenal of drugs, surgeries and therapies.
During the Middle Ages, medicine was roughly
equal to religion in its ability to treat disease. Born of this
ignorance were countless false cures and useless treatments, though
perhaps none were as influential as the system known as the Doctrine
of Signatures. It all started from the most unlikely of sources...
Jakob Boehme was born in 1575 in Görlitz,
Germany. He was from a rather unremarkable Lutheran family and grew
up to be a shoemaker. What set him apart from the crowd, however,
was that he claimed to have experienced eye-opening visions throughout
his early life in which God showed him the true nature of pretty
much everything, from spiritual matters to the structure of the
natural world itself. This was big stuff from a man who was more
qualified to expound on the nature of a sole than the soul.
Perhaps because he feared the social repercussions,
Boehme didn't mention his visions to anyone. He continued to live
the life of an average family man until a particularly vibrant vision
in 1610, after which he could keep silent no more. Boehme's first
written work was entitled Aurora, a mystical detailing of
his visions. It was widely read, though the church didn't exactly
take kindly to the prophet-like shoemaker. Fearful of the threat
of exile, he laid down his pen until 1623, when he was compelled
to write again. He was soon run out of town, even though he was
developing quite the following.
Before he died in 1624, Boehme authored De
Signatura Rerum, or The Signature of All Things. Its
basic premise was that God had marked every one of his creations
with a clue as to its functional properties. A plant's usefulness
could be determined by its form or characteristics, such as its
colour or where it grew.
Chances are, Boehme pilfered some of his material
from the first famed physician to suggest such a thing. Paracelsus
(1493-1541), the brilliant Swiss doctor and astrologer, also based
his arbitrary medical opinions on links between the looks of things.
But the German cobbler wasn't interested in cures; he simply wanted
to share his description of what he understood to be God's handprint
in the world in order to help everyday folk build up their spiritual
sides.
BRITISH BOTANISTS
The idea that the mysteries of the natural world could be so simply
unravelled was one that appealed to many. Not long after Boehme's
death, two major figures of 17th-century science -- the English
botanists Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) and William Coles (1626-
1662) -- became entranced by the idea of plant signatures.
Making Boehme's system useful on a daily basis
would take some doing. Culpeper had a thriving medical practice
in London during the early 17th century and enjoyed scouring the
countryside for useful herbs. On many a nature walk he wondered,
if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck... might it also
cure a duck? In order to frame Boehme's beliefs as a form of medicine,
Culpeper took the signatures system, cleaned it up a bit and legitimized
it under the guise of reason. His two major works, The English
Physician and Complete Herbal, anthologized hundreds
of plants and their functions.
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