Friedrich H. Lewy

Friedrich Lewy was a redirect to this article. For other people see Fritz Lewy ; on the mathematician see Friedrich Wilhelm Levi .

Friedrich H. Lewy

Friedrich Jacob Heinrich Lewy (later Frederic Henry Lewey , born January 28, 1885 in Berlin , † October 5, 1950 in Haverford , Pennsylvania ) was a German-American neurologist , psychiatrist and neuropathologist .

Life

Friedrich Lewy (far right) with employees, the third from the back right is Alois Alzheimer

Lewy was the son of a Jewish doctor from Berlin. After graduating from the Friedrichswerder school in Berlin in 1903, he studied in Berlin and Zurich medicine and received his doctorate in 1910 in Berlin. After completing his studies, Lewy worked as an assistant at the Physiological Institute in Breslau and Berlin from 1909 to 1910, then at the psychiatric clinic in Munich in the Alois Alzheimer's laboratory under Emil Kraepelin . He followed Alzheimer's to Breslau in 1912 and became head of his laboratory, a position he held until the beginning of the First World War . During the war, Lewy served as a military doctor in France, Russia and Turkey. After the war he worked at the 2nd Medical Clinic of the Charité in Berlin. Lewy completed his habilitation in neurology in 1921. He was appointed associate professor of internal medicine and neurology. In 1926 he became head of the neurological department of the Charité and in 1930 of the neurological institute in Berlin. Finally, in 1932, he founded an independent neurological clinic and research institute in Berlin, which he headed until the National Socialists withdrew his teaching license in 1933 due to his Jewish origins . In the summer of 1933 he first emigrated to England, but could not find a permanent position there. In 1934 he went to the United States , changed his name to Lewey, converted to Quaker and received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Department of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania . From 1943 to 1945 he worked again as a military doctor, then he worked again at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1950. His exile reflects the fate of many German Jews and scientists in the first half of the 20th century.

plant

Lewy bodies in the substantia nigra with a brown coloration of the α-synuclein in Parkinson's disease

Lewy became known as the discoverer of Lewy bodies (engl. Lewy Bodies ), a specific form of protein inclusions in cells of the nervous system, in 1912. Lewy they first described in the dorsal vagal core and in the nucleus basalis of Meynert of Parkinson patients. Trétiakoff named it in 1919 after its discoverer as corps de Lewy . These inclusion bodies are found particularly in Parkinson's disease , here more frequently in the substantia nigra and in the locus caeruleus . In Lewy body dementia , however, they occur diffusely cortically and subcortically in the brain. Lewy described this as early as 1923, although Lewy body dementia was only later defined as an independent clinical picture. Dendrites enriched with the protein of the Lewy bodies ( α-synuclein ) are also known today as Lewy dendrites .

With Theodor Brugsch (1878–1963), Lewy was editor of the textbook Die Biologie der Person .

Literature by Friedrich H. Lewy

• Paralysis agitans . In: Max Lewandowsky (Ed.): Handbuch der Neurologie , Volume I Pathological Anatomy , Berlin, Springer Verlag 1912, pages 920-933.
• The doctrine of tone and movement . In: Monographs from the entire field of neurology and psychiatry , issue 24. Berlin, 1923.
• The oblongata and the cranial nerve nuclei . In: Manual of normal and pathological physiology . Volume 10. Berlin, 1927.
• The motor skills . In: The Biology of the Person . Berlin and Vienna, Urban & Schwarzenberg 1926–1931.

literature

• Bernd Holdorff : Fritz Heinrich Lewy (1885–1950) . In: Journal of Neurology, Volume 253, Number May 5, 2006, pages 677-678. PMID 16767545 .
• Bernd Holdorff: Friedrich Heinrich Lewy (1885-1950) and his work . In: Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 2002, Volume 11, Number March 1, 2002, pages 19-28. PMID 12012571
• F. Schiller: Fritz Lewy and his bodies . In: Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 2000, Volume 9, Number August 2, 2000, pages 148-151. PMID 11232516
• J. Peiffer: The expulsion of German neuropathologists 1933–1939 . In: The neurologist. Issue 69, No. Feb. 2, 1998, pp. 99-109. ISSN  0028-2804 online: ISSN  1433-0407 PMID 9551453

footnote

1. ↑ Lewy wrote his name in the USA Lewey . He is also known as Frederic Lewy in Anglo-American literature .