In 1912, Friedrich Heinrich Lewy first described the inclusion bodies named after him and seen in paralysis agitans (p.a.). Tretiakoff had found (1919) that the nucleus niger is most likely to be affected but in a subsequent large-scale series of post-mortem examinations (1923). Lewy was able to confirm this for a minority of cases only, with the exception of those that displayed postencephalitic Parkinsonism (and an unknown number of atypical Parkinson syndrome cases not identified until the 1960s). In a speculative paper (1932), he saw similarities between inclusion bodies in p.a. and viral diseases like lyssa and postulated a viral genesis of p.a. In a historical review of basal ganglia diseases (1942), he did not mention the putative significance of the inclusion bodies for the post-mortem diagnosis. It seems that their importance was seen only after Lewy's death, long after Tretiakoff's initial naming of the 'corps de Lewy'. Lewy, however, had already described their diffuse and cortical distribution (1923). An identification of diffuse Lewy body disease or dementia followed much later. Lewy's career in many diverse branches of neurology and internal medicine was strongly affected by World War I and the difficult situation faced by Jews in Germany. Shortly after the Neurological Institute was founded in Berlin in 1932 (as a clinic and research institute), he was forced, in 1933, to emigrate. His exile in England and the United States mirrors the fate of many German Jews and academics in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1912, Fritz Heinrich Lewy described neuronal inclusions in the brain of patients who had suffered from Paralysis agitans (i.e., Parkinson's disease). Later, these findings became the so-called "Lewy bodies." However, little is known about the man who made this discovery. Our aim was to investigate Lewy's private and professional life and to gather information for a detailed biography. We contacted over 100 archives, libraries, and museums in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Over 300 documents, publications, and photos were collected. Lewy was born in Berlin, Germany in 1885 and lived there until 1933. After his dismissal on racial grounds by the Nazis, Lewy emigrated to England in 1933 and to the United States of America in 1934, where he lived and worked until his death in 1950. This article gives a summary of Lewy's life and briefly presents his contribution to German and American neurology.

During the years from 1908 until 1923, Lewy was the first to detail the pathological anatomy of Parkinson's disease, leading to his seminal contribution in 1912 describing the neuronal eosinophilic cytoplasmatic concentric inclusion bodies in the brainstem, later accomplished by more systematic investigations in 1923 (Lewy in Lewandowsky's Handbuch der Neurologie, 3. Band: Spez. Neurologie II. Springer, Berlin, pp 920-933, 1912). With the exception of a minority of cases and those that displayed postencephalitic Parkinsonism, Lewy was not able to confirm the significance of the substantia nigra. The findings of Tretiakoff in 1919 (significance of the substantia nigra in PD and coining of the term 'Corps de Lewy') have been underestimated or ignored for a long time. In a historical review on basal ganglia diseases from 1942, Lewy stressed the histological abnormalities of the basal ganglia and their diffuse distribution but not expressly the inclusion bodies, which in his former studies were unique in PD. For Lewy this finding was not a characteristic of the disease. Subsequent to his expulsion from Nazi-Germany in 1933, Lewy never resumed his research on PD. At the time of Lewy's death in 1950, the era of the Lewy bodies, Lewy-body-disease and the identification of atypical Parkinson syndrome cases had not even begun and followed much later.

No abstract

The concept of traumatic neurosis conceived by Hermann Oppenheim (1858-1919) located post-traumatic nervous symptoms between hysteria and neurasthenia, considering them a consequence of physical reactions to fright and a cause of molecular tissue changes. As early as 1890, his concept was criticized at an international congress in Berlin. In February 1916, there was a significant debate of the issue in Berlin, and eventually Oppenheim's concept was completely defeated at the war meeting of German neuropsychiatrists in September 1916 in Munich. In the Berlin debate, a range of views on war neurosis was presented. Partly as a result of this, but also due to the powerful position of Oppenheim himself, it was not until after the end of WWI that traumatic neurosis was excluded from medico-legal assessments. The differing views of physiological brain-mind relations from that time do not differ greatly from present concepts. However, Oppenheim's traumatic neurosis with its more quasi-neurological picture should not be equated with PTSD.