Frederic Lewy

Friedrich Heinrich Lewy, known as Fritz Lewy and in his later years as Frederic Henry Lewey, was a German-born American neurologist, born in Berlin on 28 January 1885 into a Jewish family. He trained in Berlin and Zurich and graduated from Berlin in 1910. He is best known for the discovery of Lewy bodies, the intraneuronal inclusion bodies that characterize Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. He first described them in a 1912 paper based on work in Alois Alzheimer's Munich laboratory, where he was a contemporary of Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, Alfons Maria Jakob and Ugo Cerletti, and the structures were later named after him. In 1933 he fled Nazi Germany and moved to the United States. He died in Haverford, Pennsylvania, on 5 October 1950, aged 65. His name now sits in the vocabulary of neuropathology through the disease entities that carry it.