Established over 151 years ago, Napiers has become one of the UK’s leading complementary and natural health care providers. We are dedicated to the best of health and wellbeing through the use of herbal medicine and other natural therapies.
We have one of the largest teams of professional natural health and herbal practitioners in the UK. All our practitioners are qualified and members of their practice associations such as NIMH (The National Acssociation of Medical Herbalists). We offer a wide range of complementary therapies in our five clinics each attached to a Napiers health store.
A Brief History
Napiers the Herbalists was founded by Duncan Napier, an eminent Victorian herbalist and botanist on 25 May 1860 in Bristo Place which is still open to this day. He was a foundling, abandoned by his parents, and was raised by the local innkeeper. Apprenticed to a baker, the flour dust triggered a cough he could not shake off. Looking for a cure, he became interested in herbs and created his famed Lobelia Cough Syrup. The result was so successful that it inspired him to train as a herbalist and he joined the Edinburgh Botanical Society. He opened the Bristo Place shop where people queued for hours to see him. At the weekends he walked the Scottish hills, collecting plants and herbs for his herbal remedies, sold as far away as New York. He became a well-respected member of the Medical Reformers of England and the British Pharmaceutical Society. His three sons, and then his grandsons joined the business and it became D. Napier and Sons.
The business continued in the Napier family until the sad death of John Napier during the 1970s. Napiers became a health food store for a while and was then bought by Jan De Vries in the 1980s. In 1989, Dee Atkinson started practicing and revived the herbal clinics, taking the practice over in 1990. Since then Napiers has grown from strength to strength.
Until 2005 we manufactured many of Mr Napiers’ formulas and tonics on site, using traditional methods. However, in 2005 we transferred our manufacturing to licensed factories where they are made to modern standards. All our manufacturing is done in the UK and we also source our herbs primarily from farms in the UK, with some coming from Europe and the USA. We run a pharmacovigilance system and aim for the highest standards in both our scientific understanding of herbal medicine as well as our commitment to clinical excellence. In 2005, the business expanded into England to a total of 12 shops. These were later branded as Culpeper shops with new investors in the group.
John Napier blending tinctures in 1950
In 2007 Napiers became independent again when Dee was joined by her business partner, Monica Wilde, to take on the new challenges of licensing our Napiers medicines and expanding the market for them. In 2008, we acquired a portfolio of traditional PL licences from Rickard Lane’s in Plymouth, Potters and other Victorian herbalists that closely matched our traditional formulas. Since then we have been busy updating these and converting them to the new THR licensing scheme. Duncan Napiers’ wish was “to provide a safe and affordable alternative choice to chemical medicine” and we are committed to doing this by keeping a range of over-the-counter herbal medicines available to customers, as well as a choice of consultations with our medical herbalists who will prescribe individual medicines made up in our dispensaries.
We now supply Napiers herbal products to several hundred health stores and independent pharmacies in the UK. We also export to Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, Scandinavia, Cyprus, the USA and many other countries.
Under the guidance of Dee Atkinson MNIMH, in Scotland we see between 22,000 and 23,000 patients every year for a wide range of complaints.
If you would like to read more about the history of Napiers, you can purchase a book by the late Tom Atkinson.
For more details of the therapies Napiers offers go to www.napiers.net