ABSTRACT
Early modern occult spirituality was closely associated with medicine, and many
of the writers whose works we have been examining were either professional
physicians or lay practitioners of the healing arts. The occult philosophy shaped
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century medicine through the doctrine of signatures,
which was not just a piece of metaphysical speculation, but also had a practical
medical application. In his Botonologia, Robert Turner observed that ‘God hath imprinted on Plants, Herbs, and Flowers, as it were in Hieroglyphicks, the very
Signature of their Vertues.’1 The form of a plant indicated its medical properties by
its similarity to either the afflicted organ or the disease to be cured. Walnuts, for
example, are good for the brain, and kidney beans for kidneys. In its medical form,
the doctrine of signatures was of widespread currency, forming the background to
such herbalist works as Nicholas Culpeper’s English Physitian, a book which is still in print in a variety of editions, mostly under the name of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. Culpeper’s medicine was also based on astrology: ‘he that would know the reason of the operation of the Herbs, must look up as high as the Stars,
Astrology, a science closely related to (although far from identical with) the
occult philosophy, provided an important ‘system of preventative and explanatory
physic’ throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 If astrology itself was
to decline as an element of learned medicine after the seventeenth century, some of
its assumptions were to enjoy a revival in late eighteenth-century mesmerism.
