Louis Lewin

Louis Lewin was a German pharmacologist, born on 9 November 1850 in Tuchel, West Prussia, who died in Berlin on 1 December 1929. He was educated at the gymnasium and the University of Berlin, took his medical degree in 1876, and then spent two years in Munich in the laboratories of von Voit and Pettenkofer. Back in Berlin in 1878 he became an assistant at the university's pharmacological institute, was admitted to the medical faculty as a Privatdozent in 1881, and was appointed professor in 1897. His 1881 book on the side effects of medicines was the first of its kind and treated the borderline between pharmacological and toxicological action. In 1887 he received his first sample of peyote from the physician John Raleigh Briggs and later published the first methodical analysis of it, so that a variant was named Anhalonium lewinii in his honor. His 1924 book Phantastica began an era of ethnobotany. In 1929 he wrote of a causal connection between dental amalgam fillings and illness, which fed a sharp German debate, and a Berlin street and underground station are named for him.