Illustrated with full-page woodcut illustrations drawn by Albrecht Meyer, copied onto the blocks by Heinrich Füllmaurer and cut by Veit Rudolf Speckle; the artists' self-portraits appear on the final leaf. Describing and illustrating circa 400 native German and 100 foreign plants-- wild and domestic—in alphabetical order, with a discussion of their medical uses, De historia stirpium was probably inspired by the pioneering effort of Otto Brunfels, whose Herbarum vivae imagines had appeared twelve years earlier. "These two works have rightly been ascribed importance in the history of botany, and for two reasons. In the first place they established the requisites of botanical illustration—verisimilitude in form and habit, and accuracy of significant detail.... Secondly they provided a corpus of plant species which were identifiable with a considerable degree of certainty by any reasonably careful observer, no matter by what classical or vernacular names they were called...." (Morton, History of Botanical Science [1981] 124).

Fuchs's herbal contained the first glossary of botanical terms, and provided the first depictions of a number of American plants, including pumpkins and maize. The book is especially remarkable for its generous tribute to the artists Meyer, Füllmaurer and Speckle, whose self-portraits appear on the last leaf. This tribute to the artists may be unique among sixteenth century scientific works, many of which were illustrated by unidentified artists, or artists identified by name only. It is especially unusual for the name of the artist who transferred the drawings onto the woodblocks to be recorded, let alone for that artist to be portrayed.

Translated into French by Eloy de Maignan as Commentaires tres excellens de l'hystoire des plantes , composez premièrement en latin par Leonarth Fousch , medecin tres renommé . et depuis nouvellement traduictz en langue Françoise , par un homme scavant & bien expert en la matière. Paris: Chez Iacques Gazeau , en la rue Sainct Iehan de Latran devant le college de Cambrai, 1549.

Facsimile edition with commentary volume: The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs, edited by F. G. Meyer, E. M. Trueblood and J. L. Heller, 2 vols., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. This includes English translations of selected portions of the herbal. For further information see the entry at HistoryofInformation.com at this link.