Leonhart Fuchs , sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, i.e. a herbal. It was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings were in use beforehand in other herbal books, Fuchs' herbal book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plant name stands for. The botanical genus Fuchsia is named in his honour, and consequently the colour fuchsia.
Like his medieval predecessors and his contemporaries, Fuchs was heavily influenced by the three Greek and Roman writers on medicine and materia medica, Dioscorides, Hippocrates, and Galen. He wanted to fight the Arab hegemony in medicine, as it had been transmitted by the Medical School of Salerno, 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 plantsin situ. He founded one of the first German botanical gardens.
Eponymy (proper name)
Fuchs' name is preserved by the plant Fuchsia, discovered in the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean in 1696/97 by the French scientist and Minim monk Charles Plumier. He published the first description of "Fuchsia triphylla, flore coccineo" in 1703. It is sometimes thought that the color fuchsia is also named for Fuchs, but that derives from fuchsine, an early trade name for the dye rosaniline and hydrochloride, which produces a brilliant pink-purple color. Magenta is another competing trade name for the same dye in England. The dye was given the name of fuchsine in France by its original manufacturer Renard frères et Franc to capitalize both on the increasing popularity of the genus Fuchsia in fashionable gardens and the fact that Renard in French and Fuchs in German both mean fox. An 1861 article in Répertoire de Pharmacie in fact confirms that the name was simply chosen for these two reasons and irrelevant of the actual colors of any flowers in the genus Fuchsia.
Publications
Errata recentiorum medicorum , his first publication, in which he argued for the use of "simples" rather than the noxious "compounds" of arcane ingredients concocted in medieval medicine.
De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, his great herbal, which was offered, with varying degrees of fidelity to his text, as "New Kreüterbuch" in a German translation, "New Herbal" in English, "Den nieuwen Herbarius, dat is dat boeck van den cruyden" in Dutch.
Fuchs tried to identify the plants described by the classical authors. Over a decade, Fuchs began to prepare for the publication of his herbal. He stocked the garden attached to his house with rare specimens solicited from friends around Europe, and he assembled a large botanical library. The book contains the description of about 400 wild and more than 100 domesticated plant species and their medical uses in alphabetical order: Fuchs made no attempt at presenting them in a natural system of classification. The first reports of Zea mays and of chili 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 and Albrecht Meyer, the woodcutter Veit Rudolph Speckle, portraits of whom are contained in the volume. It was printed at the famous shop of Michael Isengrin in Basel. Its appeal to gardeners, botanists, bibliophiles, and the casual viewer was immediate, while the clarity of its plant pictures continues to define a standard for botanical illustrators.
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, 1539.
Alle Kranckheyt der Augen, 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.
