Leonhart Fuchs
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
and one of the three founding fathers of botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
, along with Otto Brunfels
Otto Brunfels
Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and botanist...
and Hieronymus Bock
Hieronymus Bock
Hieronymus Bock was a German botanist, physician, and Lutheran minister who began the transition from medieval botany to the modern scientific worldview by arranging plants by their relation or resemblance....
(also called Hieronymus Tragus).
Biography
Fuchs was born in WemdingWemding
Wemding is a municipality in the Donau-Ries district of Bavaria, Germany. Botanist Leonhart Fuchs was born here in 1501.Wemding is home to the Time pyramid, a public art work begun in 1993 and scheduled to be completed in the year 3183....
in the Duchy of Bavaria
Duchy of Bavaria
The Duchy of Bavaria was the only one of the stem duchies from the earliest days of East Francia and the Kingdom of Germany to preserve both its name and most of its territorial extent....
. After visiting a school in Heilbronn
Heilbronn
Heilbronn is a city in northern Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is completely surrounded by Heilbronn County and with approximately 123.000 residents, it is the sixth-largest city in the state....
, Fuchs went to the Marienschule in Erfurt
Erfurt
Erfurt is the capital city of Thuringia and the main city nearest to the geographical centre of Germany, located 100 km SW of Leipzig, 150 km N of Nuremberg and 180 km SE of Hannover. Erfurt Airport can be reached by plane via Munich. It lies in the southern part of the Thuringian...
, Thuringia
Thuringia
The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....
at the age of twelve, and graduated as Baccalaureus artium. In 1524 he became Magister Artium in Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt is a city in the Free State of Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is located along the banks of the Danube River, in the center of Bavaria. As at 31 March 2011, Ingolstadt had 125.407 residents...
, and was received doctor of medicine
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
in the same year.
From 1524-1526 he practiced as a doctor in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, until he received a chair of medicine at Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt is a city in the Free State of Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is located along the banks of the Danube River, in the center of Bavaria. As at 31 March 2011, Ingolstadt had 125.407 residents...
in 1526. From 1528-1531 he was the personal physician of Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg in Ansbach
Anspach
Anspach may refer to:In places:* Neu-Anspach, Hesse, Germany* The former name of Ansbach, Bavaria, GermanyIn people:* Henri Anspach , Belgian épée and foil fencer* Paul Anspach , Belgian épée and foil fencer...
.
Fuchs was called to Tübingen
Tübingen
Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...
by Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg
Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg
Herzog Ulrich von Württemberg succeeded his kinsman Eberhard II as Duke of Württemberg in 1498, being declared of age in 1503.-Early life:...
in 1533 to help in reforming the University of Tübingen in the spirit of humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
. He created its first medicinal garden in 1535 and served as chancellor seven times, spending the last thirty-one years of his life as professor of medicine. Fuchs died in Tübingen in 1566.
Scientific views
Like his medieval predecessorsMedieval medicine
Medieval medicine in Western Europe was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity, spiritual influences and what Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies as the "shamanistic complex" and "social consensus." In this era, there was no tradition of scientific medicine, and observations went...
and his contemporaries, Fuchs was heavily influenced by the three Greek and Roman writers on medicine and materia medica
Materia medica
Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing . The term 'materia medica' derived from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica libre...
, Dioscorides, Hippocrates
Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles , and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine...
, and Galen
Galen
Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , better known as Galen of Pergamon , was a prominent Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher...
. He wanted to fight the Arab hegemony in medicine, as it had been transmitted by the medical school of Salerno
Salerno
Salerno is a city and comune in Campania and is the capital of the province of the same name. It is located on the Gulf of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea....
, and to "return" to the Greek authors. But he saw the importance of practical experience as well and offered botanical field days for the students, where he demonstrated the medicinal plants in situ. He founded one of the first German botanical garden
Botanical garden
A botanical garden The terms botanic and botanical, and garden or gardens are used more-or-less interchangeably, although the word botanic is generally reserved for the earlier, more traditional gardens. is a well-tended area displaying a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names...
s.
Eponymy
Fuchs' name is preserved by the plant FuchsiaFuchsia
Fuchsia is a genus of flowering plants that consists mostly of shrubs or small trees. The first, Fuchsia triphylla, was discovered on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1703 by the French Minim monk and botanist, Charles Plumier...
, discovered on Santo Domingo
Santo Domingo
Santo Domingo, known officially as Santo Domingo de Guzmán, is the capital and largest city in the Dominican Republic. Its metropolitan population was 2,084,852 in 2003, and estimated at 3,294,385 in 2010. The city is located on the Caribbean Sea, at the mouth of the Ozama River...
in the Caribbean in 1696/97 by the French scientist Dom Charles Plumier
Charles Plumier
Charles Plumier was a French botanist, after whom the Frangipani genus Plumeria is named. Plumier is considered one of the most important of the botanical explorers of his time...
, who published the first description of "Fuchsia triphylla, flore coccineo" in 1703. The color fuchsia
Fuchsia (color)
Fuchsia is a vivid reddish or pinkish purple color named after the flower of the fuchsia plant, itself named after the German scientist Leonhart Fuchs...
is also named for him, describing the purplish-red of the shrub's flowers.
Publications
- Errata recentiorum medicorum ("Errors of recent doctors") (Hagenau, 1530), his first publication, in which he argued for the use of "simples" (herbHerbExcept in botanical usage, an herb is "any plant with leaves, seeds, or flowers used for flavoring, food, medicine, or perfume" or "a part of such a plant as used in cooking"...
s) rather than the noxious "compounds" of arcane ingredients concocted in medieval medicine.
- De historia stirpium commentarii insignes ("Notable commentaries on the history of plants", BaselBaselBasel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, 1542), his great herbalHerbalAThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...
, which was offered, with varying degrees of fidelity to his text, as "New Kreüterbuch" in a German translation (1543), "New HerbalHerbalAThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...
" in English, "Den nieuwen Herbarius, dat is dat boeck van den cruyden" (1543) in Dutch.
Fuchs tried to identify the plants described by the classical authors. The book contains the description of about 400 wild and more than 100 domesticated plant species and their medical uses ("Krafft und Würckung") in alphabetical order: Fuchs made no attempt at presenting them in a natural system of classification. The first reports of Zea mays and of chilli peppers were among the exotic new species The text is mainly based on Dioscorides.
The book contains 512 pictures of plants, largely growing locally, in woodcuts. The illustrators were Heinrich Füllmauer and Albert Meyer, the woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
ter Veit Rudolph Speckle, portraits of whom are contained in the volume. It was printed at the famous shop of Michael Isengrin in Basel.
- Eyn Newes hochnutzlichs Büchlin/und Anothomi eynes auffgethonen augs/auch seiner erklärung bewerten purgation/Pflaster/Tollirien/Sälblin pulvern unnd wassern/wie mans machen und brauchen sol (A new, very useful book and anatomy of the open eye/also an explanation of useful purgatives/plasters/poultices/salves, powders and waters/how one should make and use them), 1539.
- Alle Kranckheyt der Augen (All diseases of the eye), 1539.
Fuchs's books on the anatomy of the eye and its diseases were among the standard references on this subject during this period.
- All in all, Leonhart Fuchs wrote more than 50 books and polemics.
External links
Historical editions- New Herbal (English title)
- De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (German edition, 1542). From Rare Book RoomRare Book RoomRare Book Room is an educational website for the repository of digitally scanned rare books made freely available to the public.Starting around 1996 the California based company Octavo began scanning rare and important books from libraries around the world. These scans were done at extremely high...
. - Den nieuwen Herbarius, dat is dat boeck van den cruyden (Dutch edition, 1543).
- "New Herbal", extracts, English, Glasgow Library Archive/
- De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (German edition, 1542). From Rare Book Room
- Plate from Eyn Newes hochnutzlichs Büchlin (PDF)
- Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries High resolution images of works by Leonhart Fuchs in .jpg and .tiff format.
Modern editions
- Klaus Dobat/Werner Dressendorfer (eds.) Leonhart Fuchs: The New Herbal of 1543 (Taschen 2001).
- Frederick Meyer/Emily Trueblood/John Heller (eds.) The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, 1542: Vol 1 & 2. (Stanford University Press 1999).