Culpeper describes hemp remedies in an English herbal

Nicholas Culpeper’s 1652 English herbal treats hemp as a plant familiar to the household, the field and the medicine cupboard. His entry brings together cultivation, remedies and astrology. It offers evidence of how an English author understood cannabis well before nineteenth-century interest in Indian hemp.

A familiar crop

Culpeper opens by saying that country housewives already know the plant, so he considers a description unnecessary. He gives a seasonal outline: sowing at the end of March or beginning of April, followed by ripening in August or September.

His closing joke says hemp has uses beyond making halters. The remark places the medicinal entry beside an ordinary material use of the plant. A household reader could encounter hemp as both a useful fibre and a source of preparations discussed in a herbal.

Different parts of the plant

The remedies are not confined to flowers or resin. Culpeper discusses seeds prepared in milk, seed emulsions or decoctions, root decoctions, plant juice and distilled water. He attributes uses to them for complaints including cough, bowel problems, gout and burns.

These are the author’s therapeutic claims. The passage does not provide controlled comparisons, measured cannabinoid content or evidence that every preparation had the same action. Reading it as an early description of a modern standardized cannabis medicine would erase differences in plant part, preparation and explanation.

Medicine and astrology

Culpeper assigns hemp to Saturn and discusses bodily processes through humours, wind and obstructions. These terms belong to the explanatory system of the text. They help identify what the author thought a remedy was doing, rather than establish its pharmacological mechanism.

The entry also attributes a seed emulsion to Dutch practice. That is evidence of a cross-regional claim in an English book; it does not by itself establish how widely the preparation was actually used in the Netherlands.

Which edition supports the account

The source here is the EEBO–Text Creation Partnership transcription of a 1652 copy printed by Peter Cole, with the hemp entry spanning printed pages 63–64. Later editions and modern compilations can have different pagination and wording.

The publication is recorded as an event in the history of Britain. It documents a particular printed account, without claiming that Culpeper discovered medicinal cannabis, that his remedies were newly invented, or that their appearance in a book changed the law.^[1]