A wealthy man with a penchant for natural history, von Uffenbach visited botanical gardens, anatomical theaters, and cabinets of curiosity including the cabinet of the anatomist
Frederik Ruysch, where he got a peek at a preserved head of young girl reputed to be so life-like that Peter the Great had once kissed it.
In spite of this goal, however, she does not emphasize her corrections to past publications, such as the fact that Merian "was a Calvinist, not a Lutheran, that she went to Suriname with her younger, not her older daughter, that she was not sponsored by Nicolaes Witsen, burgomaster of Amsterdam, nor by the scholarly physician and collector
Frederik Ruysch, that she did not die in poverty, and so on" (13).