Leonhart Fuchs

See also: Fuchs

Leonhart Fuchs , born the January 17th 1501 with Wemding close to Nördlingen and dead the May 10th 1566 with Tübingen, a Doctor and a German Botanist . With Hieronymus Bock says Tragus, Otto Brunfels and Valerius Cordus, it is regarded as one of the German fathers of the Botanique.

It makes its studies with Heilbronn and Erfurt. It obtains with Ingolstadt the title of doctor with in 1524 and settles with Munich. In 1526, it obtains the pulpit of medicine in Ingolstadt which it keeps two years until he becomes the doctor of the Margrave Georges of Brandebourg to Ansbach. It must leave its city because of religious intolerance.

Fuchs is called in Tübingen by the duke Ulrich in 1535 to take part in the reform of the university in the spirit of the Humanisme. Fuchs is also credited like the founder with the first German Botanical garden.

The influence of the old authors

Fuchs is influenced by the Greek and Roman authors, in particular Dioscoride, Hippocrates and Galien. But in its works, it is interested initially in the German flora and described more than 400 species of its country in Of historia stirpium commentarii (1542, Basle), of which about thirty has only one decorative interest and are thus not illustrated for their uses in the pharmacopeia. The illustrations (the drawings are of Albert Meyer and engravings of Veit Rudolph Speckle) are at least as precise as those of Brunfels. They will be taken again besides regularly by the later authors. This flora also describes a thousand of foreign species.

In its foreword, he regrets the ignorance of botany, even in the doctors. But if he does not hesitate to criticize the classic authors, he does not try to work out classification and he arranges the plants according to an alphabetical order. He uses a binomial system without to systematize it as will do it Carl von Linné. Thus, each chapter presents a kind and is subdivided in several parts which treat successively various names which were allotted to the plant, of the various species which compose this kind, of the morphological differences between these species, of the mediums where they are found, their various properties allotted by the old authors and, to finish, of the therapeutic functions of use at its time.

The use of the kind and the species

The criteria which Fuchs uses to delimit the species base not on the fructification or reproductive organs, but the general appearance of the flowers, even on their odor, their color, the size of the sheets… It is also necessary to note the importance of the part devoted to synonymy. This one will increase gradually during the development of botany, marking the rise of this science. At such point, that the herbaria which appear are initially works of synonymy before being works of descriptive botanies.

The Fuchsia, discovered on the island of Santo Domingo in 1696 or 1697, was dedicated to him by Charles Plumier in 1703

External bond

  • Work of Fuchs digitized by the SICD of the universities of Strasbourg

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