LEONHARD

FUCHS (15o1-1566)  , German physician and botanist, was born at Wembdingen in Bavaria on the 17th of January 15o1 . He attended school at Heilbronn and Erfurt, and in 1521 graduated at the university of Ingolstadt . About the same time he espoused the doctrines of the Reformation . Having in 1524 received his diploma as doctor of medicine, he practised for two years in Munich . He became in 1526 professor of medicine at Ingolstadt, and in 1528 physician to the margrave of Anspach . In Anspach he was the means of saving the lives of many during the epidemic locally known as the " English sweating-sickness." By the duke of Wurttemberg he was, in 1535, appointed to the professorship of medicine at the university of Tubingen, a post held by him till his death on the loth of May 1566 . Fuchs was an advocate of the Galenic school of medicine, and published several Latin translations of treatises by its founder and by Hippocrates . But his most important publication was De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Basel, 1542), a work illustrated with more than five hundred excellent outline illustrations, including figures of the common foxglove and ofanother species of the genus Digitalis, which was so named by him .