Fuchs's botanical descriptions are very accurate and mark a significant advancement in medical botany in respect of earlier somewhat crude herbals. The readers were provided with an index of illnesses treatable with herbs, so as to facilitate consultation. This time, Fuch s target was common people interested in the natural world and the popular remedies derived from them. As he explains in the preface of the work, he wished his own German translation to reach a broader audience than Latinate scholars and physicians, who had found in herbals a fundamental medical tool since Antiquity and the Middle Ages and hailed with enthusiasm the Latin first edition of the work.
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Fuchs wrote many medical commentaries and treatises, though this herbal was by far his major achievement. A plant and the colour fuchsia are named after him. There, he served Duke Ulrich of Württemberg and contributed massively to the reform of the local university, which became the first German institution of its kind to adopt a humanist and Lutheran programme. After completing his medical studies in Ingolstadt and teaching in that university, he moved to Tübingen. Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566) was an eminent physician and botanist of the early German Reformation. Here, many mistakes were corrected and five additional woodcuts were inserted, namely those depicting Hunerbis, Spitziger Wegerich, klein Schlangen kraut, Knabenkrautweible and Kuchens chell. First German edition of the most celebrated and beautiful herbal ever published, issued only a year after the princeps. Corning Collection on pastedown, seventeenth-century ex libris of Nobilis Francisci Fidelis, prospective graduate in medicine at Leiden University. A very good copy, partially hand-coloured in the printing shop, in contemporary pigskin over thick-wooden boards, blind-tooled, triple fillet rolls of interlacing floral decorations, medallions, antiques, grape and vine leaves, central panel with flower bunches to corner and centre original clasps slightly rubbed, few small stains to spine and joints on front pastedown, inscription by Joseph von Gullingstein, dated 27 April 1793, nineteenth-century label of the Bibljoteka Julinska, bookplates of the Squire Library and the Warren H. Ff4-Gg4, barely touching one illustration.
LEONHARD FUCHS FULL
Gothic letter woodcut printer's device on title and larger on final recto, full-page full length portrait of Fuchs on title verso, 517 botanical woodcuts (15 with old hand-colouring) by Viet Rudolph Speckle after Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albert Meyer, portraits of the three artists at end historiated initials light water stains and finger marking to some margins at beginning and end, small marginal flaw to ff.
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