Leonhard Fuchs

German botanist and physician

• Born: January 17, 1501
• Birthplace: Wemding, Bavaria (now in Germany)
• Died: May 10, 1566
• Place of death: Tübingen, Württemberg (now in Germany)

Fuchs wrote the first significant botanical text of the Renaissance era, a massive illustrated work prized for its beauty, accuracy, and originality and considered foundational to the development of natural history. He also wrote or cowrote dozens of texts in the fields of medicine and pharmacology.

Early Life

Leonhard Fuchs (LAY-awn-hahrt FYEWKS) was the son and grandson of mayors of the Bavarian town of Wemding. His mother, Anna (Dentener) Fuchs, and grandfather, Johann Fuchs, raised him from the age of four, following the death of his father, Hans Fuchs. His grandfather instilled in him a lifelong love of nature in general and plants in particular. He was educated at home until 1511, then went to Latin school in Heilbronn, and the next year to the Erfurt Marienschule to improve his Latin and to learn Greek.

He matriculated at the University of Erfurt in 1515, received his baccalaureate in 1517, then returned to Wemding to become a schoolmaster. He soon tired of teaching and in 1519 enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt, following the classical curriculum of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. After earning his master of arts degree in 1521, he switched to medicine, receiving his medical degree at Ingolstadt in 1524.

Fuchs practiced medicine for the rest of his life, the first two years in Munich, where he married Anna Friedberg; they had four sons and six daughters. He taught medicine at Ingolstadt from 1526 to 1528, then, probably because of conflict with the conservative Roman Catholic university administration, left to become court physician to Georg von Brandenburg, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, whom he served until 1535.

The 1520’s and 1530’s were times of religious unrest throughout Germany. The snowball effect of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 wreaked hostility and ruined careers. Fuchs, always with Humanistic inclinations, was attracted to Lutheranism early, but the date of his conversion is unknown. His southern homeland remained mostly Catholic, while northern and western Germany were more receptive to the new faith. Georg, his patron, was Lutheran. In 1533, Ingolstadt, which had stayed Catholic, denied Fuchs a renewal of his old appointment.

Life’s Work

Beginning with Errata recentiorum medicorum (errors of recent physicians) in 1530, Fuchs wrote, cowrote, translated, edited, or contributed to at least fifty books, most of which were concerned in some way with medical botany or the pharmacological properties of plants but also a wide field of medical and scientific subjects. His writings were often controversial and even inflammatory, but his polemics sustained themselves by the depth of his arguments. In 1551, he plagiarized Andreas Vesalius on human anatomy, and he is probably guilty of several other charges of plagiarism, but none of that has harmed his reputation as a botanist.

In November, 1534, Ulrich, duke of Württemberg, prompted by Luther’s companion, Philipp Melanchthon, asked Fuchs to be professor of medicine at the University of Tübingen. Fuchs eagerly accepted and spent the remainder of his career in that predominantly Protestant environment, seven times serving as rector of the university. One of his first acts after arriving in August, 1535, was to plant the garden that would become the laboratory of his botanical study. About 1543, presumably because of Italy’s Catholicism, he turned down the lucrative invitation of Cosimo I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, to teach medical botany at the University of Pisa and to supervise its botanical garden.

At Tübingen, Fuchs removed astrological texts and the works of Persian physician Rhazes (c. 865-between 923 and 935) and Islamic scientist and philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) from the curriculum, but he encouraged careful study of ancient Greek medicine, the new anatomical works of Vesalius, and plants in their natural environments. He was the first professor there to take students on botanical field trips. He translated into Latin and commented on Hippocrates, Galen, and other ancient Greek authors. His approach to medicine was traditionally Hippocratic and Galenic, receptive to modern discoveries, but skeptical of herbal remedies in the hands on those who were not physicians. Even in his work on medical botany, he emphasized the botanical or structural rather than the medical or therapeutic aspects of plants.

Fuchs’s masterpiece appeared in 1542 as De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (distinguished commentaries on the history of plants; known as De historia stirpium), an exquisitely illustrated 39-centimeter (15-inch) folio known best in English as The Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs (1928). Its two artists were Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albrecht Meyer, whom Fuchs supervised closely through many drafts of each watercolor. Veyt Rudolff Speckle of Strassbourg executed the woodcuts.

Like his contemporaries Valerius Cordus, Conrad Gesner, and most other systematic botanists until the seventeenth century, Fuchs regarded his work as addenda to the first century treatise of Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos, known as De materia medica (The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, 1933), published by the renowned printer Aldus Manutius in 1499. Dioscorides described more than 600 plants. Even though Fuchs added about 100 species not mentioned by Dioscorides, the 512 woodcuts in his Herbal represent only 487 plants. He was more concerned with exactitude than thoroughness.

In 1545, Fuchs produced an 18-centimeter (7-inch) octavo, a sort of field guide called Primi de stirpium historia commentariorum tomi vivae imagines (living images of the first volumes of commentaries on the history of plants). It consisted of 516 full-page woodcut illustrations of plants, some of which were hand-colored, but no text except for a dedicatory letter and an index.

As was the academic custom until the end of the eighteenth century, Fuchs wrote mostly in Latin. A few of his books appeared in the vernacular, notably Alle Krankheyt der Augen (all diseases of the eye) in 1539 and the various popular translations of De historia stirpium.

Most of Fuchs’s works went through several editions in his lifetime. So great was his reputation throughout Europe that, despite his Protestantism, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V raised him to the nobility about 1555. His wife’s death in 1563 hit him like a mighty blow. He married a pastor’s widow in 1564, but his health declined rapidly and he died two years later.

Significance

Germans consider Fuchs the father of botany, but other countries tend to honor their own scholars, such as Nicolao Leoniceno in Italy, Gesner in Switzerland, Theophrastos of Eresos in Greece, or Carolus Linnaeus in Sweden. Even in Germany some disagreement exists about whether Otto Brunfels, Hieronymus Bock, or Fuchs deserves the most credit for making botany a respectable science. Brunfels has the edge in implementing empirical method and Bock in discovering new native German species, but Fuchs is renowned for compiling and presenting facts accurately, beautifully, and compellingly. Because of his care and precision, and especially because of the magnificence of its woodcut illustrations, rare book collectors still esteem Fuchs’s Herbal as the finest of its kind ever published.

The genus Fuchsia was named in Fuchs’s honor by French botanist Charles Plumier, who, in 1696, discovered a shrub on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that he labeled Fuchsia triphylla flora coccinea.

Fuchs’s Major Works

1530

• Errata recentiorum medicorum (errors of recent physicians)

1531

• Compendiaria ac succincta admodum in medendi artem eisagoge (a very short and concise guide to the art of healing)

1535

• Paradoxorum medicinae libri tres (three books on the paradoxes of medicine)

1539

• De medendis singularum humani corporis partium a summo capite ad imos usque pedes passionibus ac febribus libri quatuor (four books on relieving sufferings and fevers in particular parts of the human body from the top of your head to the tips of your toes)

1539

• Alle Krankheyt der Augen (all diseases of the eye)

1540

• Libri IIII, difficilium aliquot quaestionum, & hodie passim controversarum explicationes continentes (four books on some difficult questions, containing random explanations of today’s controversial issues)

1541

• Methodus seu ratio compendiaria perveniendi ad veram solidamque medicinam (a method or a concise reasoning to arrive at a real and true medicine)

1542

• De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (distinguished commentaries on the history of plants; The Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs, 1928)

1542

• De sanandis totius humani corporis (on cleansing the whole human body)

1545

• Primi de stirpium historia commentariorum tomi uiuae imagines (living images of the first volumes of commentaries on the history of plants; better known as Botany)

1548

• De curandi ratione libri octo (eight books on the rationale of curing)

1555

• Institutionum medicinae, ad Hippocratis, Galeni, aliorumque veterum scripta recte intelligenda mire utiles libri quinque (five wonderfully useful books on medical principles, for the purpose of correctly understanding the writings of Hippocrates, Galen, and other ancient physicians)

1555

• De usitata huius temporis componendorum miscendorumque medicamentorum ratione libri quatuor (four books on the thought of our day on putting together and mixing medicines)

Bibliography

Arber, Agnes Robertson. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. The standard work on the subject, provides extensive discussion of Fuchs.

Kusukawa, Sachiko. “Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures.” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 3 (July, 1997): 403-427. An article by a leading scholar of the history and philosophy of sixteenth century science in Germany.

Meyer, Frederick Gustav, Emily Emmart Trueblood, and John L. Heller. The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, 1542 (Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. A reproduction with scholarly analysis.

Neumann, Felix Jonathan. “Leonhard Fuchs, Physician and Botanist, 1501-1566.” In Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1917. Washington, D.C.: 1919. Basic biographical and bibliographical information.