Across the Usa and Canada in 1887: A German Scientist Experiences North America

By Dr. Lewis Lewin

In 1887, the renowned German scientist Louis Lewin and his uncle, John Warburg, set out across the Atlantic on what was to be an arduous seven-week journey spanning the North American continent, east and west. Lewin's wife, Clara, remained in Berlin with their daughters. In daily letters, Lewin shares with Clara his account of his trans-Atlantic trip, and of his subsequent travels by rail and steamer to Montreal, across Canada to Vancouver, thence to San Francisco, and from California back east.

While in America, Lewin investigates the status of medical school education here, visits the newly-established laboratories of the Parke-Davis Co. in Detroit, Michigan, and attends the International Medical Congress held that year in Washington, D.C. A specialist in the study of poisons and hallucinogens, Lewin also visits the opium dens of San Francisco's Chinatown, graphically describing what he sees there.

These letters are more than a pedestrian account of places visited and sights seen; they express Lewin's musings on the nascent economic power of the United States, on the disparities between rich and poor that were evident then, and on the natural resources that he observed from his train window. He is also frank about his likes and dislikes, and in assessing his own strengths and weaknesses. Louis Lewin was born in 1850 in Tuchol, in what was then West Prussia, to Orthodox Jewish parents fleeing the pogroms in eastern Poland. The family arrived in Berlin in 1856. His primary-school teachers, recognizing the young Lewin's aptitude for science, arranged for his admission to a renowned Gymnasium; that in turn enabled him to enter Berlin University. After receiving his medical degree there, Lewin's outstanding academic record would have been qualified him for a teaching position there, but the anti-Semitism of the time closed those doors to him. Instead, he set up a private laboratory and lecture hall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462019533

Dr. Lewis Lewin

LOUIS LEWIN was thirty-seven and already an established researcher in pharmacology and toxicology in his native city, Berlin, when he wrote the letters comprising this book, describing day-by-day his travels across Canada and the US in 1887. The ensuing decades would cement his position, not only in Germany but in the United States and other nations as well, as one of the leading figures of his time in the sciences. He is remembered today as a productive researcher in his areas of specialization, toxins and hallucinogens; as a pioneer in industrial hygiene; as a prolific author of textbooks and monographs; and as a beloved professor. Over a career spanning five decades, he taught and mentored hundreds of young medical students who went on to become, in their turn, leaders in their fields. We learn much from Lewin’s letters about the two nations, Canada and the United States, shortly to take their place among the leading industrialized nations of the world. As readers, we benefit from Lewin’s keen eye for beauty, for industrial development, and for travel in the 1880’s. HERTA JAFFE, the primary translator of this work, was Louis Lewin’s daughter. Escaping Nazi Germany, she emigrated to what was then Palestine in the 1930’s, worked for many years at a bookstore in Haifa, Israel and died in nearby Yifat in 1988, at 102. DANIEL SACHS, Lewin’s great-grandson, contributed to the translation of this work. A retired attorney, he resides in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

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Contents

Introduction

Hamburg to

New York

Crossing Canada

Eastward Across

the United States

Eastern Seaboard

Poems of Louis Lewin,

Composed on the Voyage

Endnotes

Dedication

This English-language translation is dedicated to the memory of all those who have gone before and upon whose shoulders we stand, and in particular to

• Louis Lewin, my greatgrandfather, born Tuchel, West Prussia 1850, died Berlin 1929.

• Clara Lewin, his wife, born Osnabrück, Germany 1858, perished in 1943 at Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czechoslovakia.

• Their daughter, Gertrud Lewin Marcuse Landsberg, born Berlin 1884, perished in 1944 at Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czechoslovakia.

• Their daughter, Herta Lewin Jaffe, born Berlin 1886, died Yifat, Israel, 1988.

• Their daughter, Irene Lewin Sachs, born Berlin 1888, died New York, 1985.

May the memory of the saintly be a blessing.

Daniel Sachs

Bethesda, Maryland, USA

March 2011

Acknowledgments

I recognize and honor the vital contributions of those who played a role in bringing these letters to the English-speaking public:

• to Louis Lewin, the author of these letters;

• to his wife, Clara, who saved them for decades and gave them to her daughters for safekeeping;

• to their youngest daughter, Irene Lewin Sachs, who preserved the letters for further decades and turned them over for publication in the German original;

• to their middle daughter, Herta Lewin Jaffe, who translated the letters into English;

• to Professor Bo Holmstedt of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Professor Karl-Heinz Lohs of the University of Leipzig, whose respect for Louis Lewin caused them to have his letters published in German in 1985 by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin;

• to Hilla Giladi, Herta Jaffe’s grandniece, who preserved the typewritten manuscript in the English translation and provided it to me;

• and to my wife, Ruth; my brother, Benjamin; and my children, Julia Loeb, George Sachs and Noah Sachs. Each of them gave generously of their talents in the editing and revision of the Introduction and in the production of this book.

Daniel Sachs

Always the free range and diversity,

Always the continent of Democracy!

Always the prairies, pastures, forests,

vast cities, travelers, …

— Walt Whitman, American Feuillage,

from Leaves of Grass (1872)

Introduction

This travel diary, the journal of the travels of Dr. Louis Lewin through Canada and the United States in the summer of 1887, is an important addition in two genres: the literature of the history of medicine and the literature of the European scientist of the nineteenth century assessing the progress of the United States, a booming nation soon to take its place among the Great Powers.

Louis Lewin: Professor, Scientist, Author, Advocate

Louis Lewin was eminently qualified to undertake his seven-week journey in 1887 to North America and to play the part of the careful observer. As a scientist, he could objectively evaluate the state of medical education in the United States and Canada and collect material for further research. Moreover, as a scientist, he had a keen eye for detail, and for assembling those little details into a harmonious whole. As a Jew, an outsider, he could understand the plight of those less fortunate than he, and could appreciate the contributions that they were making, and would continue to make, in the industrialization of the continent. Perhaps also because of his modest upbringing and subsequent transformation into an educated German, he had a keen eye and ear for what was authentic and what was phony, for cant and for humbug.

Particularly in the fast-moving world of science and technology, we are so caught up in the newest and latest that we often forget the contributions made by earlier scientists, those who laid the foundations for the discoveries and inventions of more recent generations. These scientists did not have at their disposal the electron microscopes, Hubble telescopes and other tools that researchers use today. Nor did they have a pool of volunteers willing to subject themselves to research and experimentation, as is now the norm. When research subjects were needed, the scientists exposed themselves, often at great personal risk, to the substance which they were studying. Louis Lewin was of that school, ingesting hallucinogenic drugs and carefully noting their effects on him. He deserves to be remembered today, eighty years after his death, as one of those men who laid the foundations of his discipline, psychopharmacology.

It gives me great pleasure to bring to an English-reading audience this journal of Lewin’s seven-week journey across the United States and Canada. There is much to learn from these letters about the man, his strengths and his foibles, and about his impressions of the North America of 1887.

Louis Lewin was born on November 9, 1850, in the town of Tuchel, at that time part of West Prussia and now, renamed Tuchola, part of Poland. His father, Hirsch Apfelbaum, was born and spent his early years in Suwalki. Today, that town lies in northeastern Poland but at various times in its history it has also been under the control of Lithuania, Russia, and Prussia. Hirsch Apfelbaum, later Lewin, had fled westward from Suwalki to escape anti-Jewish pogroms.

Louis Lewin had been born on the family’s westward journey. In 1856, Hirsch and his wife, with Louis and their two daughters, settled illegally in Berlin, a city which at that time was growing from a sleepy provincial capital into a booming world-class metropolis. At some point in their journey westward they changed their family name from Apfelbaum to Lewin, a name still distinctly Jewish, but less identifiable as Ostjüdisch (Eastern Jewish). Having settled the family in Berlin, Hirsch, a traditional Orthodox Jew with a minimal formal education, made a bare-sustenance living for his family as a shoe-repairer.

In those days, Jewish immigrants from the East were concentrated in a neighborhood in Berlin’s Mitte, or core, known as the Scheunenviertel (the Barn-Quarter). That’s where the Orthodox Jewish synagogues were concentrated, as were the mikvahs (ritual baths), the kosher butchers and the other establishments which met the ritual needs of an Orthodox Jewish family, and that’s where the Yiddish dialect was spoken that Hirsch Lewin and his family brought with them on their flight westward. The main thoroughfare in the Scheunenviertel, the place where Jewish businesses and institutions were concentrated, was the Grenadierstrasse, and it was to the Grenadierstrasse that Hirsch Lewin brought his wife and their three children when they arrived in Berlin. The Scheunenviertel of Louis Lewin’s childhood was a deplorable urban slum: living conditions were harsh, sanitation rudimentary, education minimal and malnutrition and social pathology rampant. Withal, it was also a vibrant center of social and cultural life and dissent of all kinds, from the far-right to the far-left.

Louis Lewin’s childhood was by no means an easy one. As a boy, he attended a Jewish day school, a cheder. The urge to learn must have been awakened early in him, and his strong interest and aptitude in the sciences brought him to the attention of the teachers at the cheder. They told his parents that the traditional Jewish education could not bring out the best in a boy so obviously talented in the sciences, and that they, the boy’s parents, would be acting in his best interest if he were enrolled in a secular secondary school, the Friedrich Werdersche Gymnasium.2 This was the same Gymnasium that the famous German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and other illustrious Germans had attended.

His father wanted no part of the change in his son’s schooling; the limited education that had been good enough for him would serve young Louis as well. Perhaps he feared also that a secular education would spur his son to put his Orthodox Jewish upbringing behind him. But Lewin’s mother, Rachel, saw the wisdom in what her son’s teachers were proposing, and prevailed on her husband to consent to the proposed move. Of course, another hurdle remained: the Gymnasium was not tuition-free, and for the Lewin family the payment of their son’s tuition was out of the question. Providence intervened: a full tuition scholarship opened the door for Louis into this new world.

Still, there were other obstacles to overcome. The process of acculturation, from the narrow world of the Scheunenviertel to the wider world of modernism, was not an easy one. When he first entered Gymnasium, Lewin could not yet speak fluent German; at home, he and his family spoke a mixture of Yiddish and German. This marked him as an outsider to his classmates, the target of much teasing and humiliation. He would remember those childhood humiliations for the rest of his life; they must have contributed to his prickly disposition, his alertness to slights both real and perceived.

Among those who taught Lewin at the Gymnasium, one man was to have an enormous influence on him: Paul Anton de Lagarde,3 later to become Professor of Oriental Languages at Göttingen University and one of the most learned men of his time. De Lagarde encouraged Lewin to obtain a University-level education, advocated on his behalf for Lewin’s admission to the Friedrich Wilhelm University,4 and, during his years there, helped him financially. Ironically, de Lagarde in his later years became an outspoken anti-Semite. He regarded the Jews as a cancer, and went so far as to urge that they be exterminated. Amazingly, the friendship between these two men, Lewin, the Jew, and de Lagarde, the anti-Semite, continued unabated until the latter’s death in 1891, notwithstanding the ideological gulf between them.

After graduating from Gymnasium, Lewin began his medical studies at the University. There he acquired a working knowledge of French, as well as Greek, Latin and Hebrew. After writing a prize-winning doctoral dissertation entitled, Experimental Researches on the Effect of Aconitines5 on the Heart, he graduated in 1875 with a medical degree.

It was probably at this time in his life that Lewin shed the orthodox Jewish coloration of the Grenadierstrasse and took on a Western style of thinking and acting. One can well imagine that this created a powerful internal tension in his thinking and conduct between the old Lewin and the new one, and perhaps an external conflict with his parents and former friends as well. He did not, however, cut his ties with his Jewish faith, as so many other acculturated Jews of his generation did. Even though he now assumed the aura of the Western man of science, responsive to the new ideas that were exploding in the Europe of the 1870’s and 1880’s, he remained an observant Jew in many respects. He continued to observe the Sabbath, walking on Saturdays the considerable distance from his elegant home in the Tiergarten section of the city back to the Scheunenviertel to pay his respects to his parents. On departing from his parents’ home, he took care to leave with them a 20-Mark gold piece, to try to ease their financial burdens.

At the same time, there were elements of his former life that he firmly turned his back on. Foremost of these was the Ostjüdische culture of the Scheunenviertel. It was a rule at the family dinnertable that Yiddish was not to be spoken there. His children were not permitted to use even the familiar Yiddish expressions that were then (and today) used even by otherwise assimilated Jews.

After completing the compulsory one year of military service, Lewin worked for a time in Munich under Pettenkofer6 and Voit.7 Through his work with Pettenkofer, he became aware of the public-health dimensions of the social problems which were all too familiar to him from his childhood; he was later to use this scientifically-oriented approach in dealing with the industrial hygiene issues submitted to him for his expert opinion.

On returning to Berlin, Lewin became an assistant to Liebreich8 and gained his habilitation9 from the Friedrich Wilhelm University as an instructor in Pharmacology, Toxicology and Hygiene.

In 1883 Lewin married Clara Bernhardine Wolff, whom he had met during a brief stay in Hamburg. The daughter of Benjamin Wolff, a melamed, or private tutor in Jewish subjects, she was born in Osnabrück, in Westphalia, and had been raised in Hamburg. Louis and Clara Lewin were to have three daughters: Gertrud, born in 1884, Herta, born in 1886, and Irene, born in 1888.

In 1893 Lewin gained the title of Professor (it appears that, in the Germany of that day, one could have the right to that title without being formally attached to a University faculty). Only in 1919, when he was 69, was he named Honorarprofessor in the Technical High School in Charlottenburg and, soon thereafter, Adjunct Professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University. However, he never attained the tenure which his academic achievements surely entitled him to, because the price of tenure was conversion to Christianity, and this was a price that he was unwilling to pay.

In an appreciation which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on January 24, 1930, after Lewin’s death, Dr. Richard Koch10 wrote that, Until his last breath, Lewin enjoyed a comforting pride in adhering to the beliefs of his ancestors. Perhaps it was that comforting pride that prevented Lewin from succumbing to what Dr. Koch referred to as that corrosive bitterness that other men were subject to, at finding their career path obstructed by obstacles having nothing to do with their professional abilities.

On his return to Berlin from Munich in 1878, the University did not offer him a teaching position, despite the brilliant record that he had compiled there as a medical student. Consequently, he opened his renowned lecture hall in rented quarters at Ziegelstrasse 3, establishing himself there as a Privatdozent, an academic who did not have formal faculty status at the University. Fortunately, Lewin’s scientific talents and his skill in presenting them to students were such that they were willing to pay at the door to hear his lectures, even though his course was not part of the university curriculum and his students could have met the requirements for graduation without paying extra to hear his lectures.

One of his students, Siegfried Loewe,11 recalled that

Lewin’s lectures were always meticulously prepared. I don’t remember a single instance when an experiment which he had set up and was demonstrating to his rapt audience didn’t work out as it was supposed to. The outlines of his lectures were always written out on the blackboard without a single erasure. Lewin spiced up his presentations by throwing out questions at his audience. His private lecture-room was as crowded at the end of the semester as at the beginning… . All in all, Louis Lewin’s course was my favorite recollection from my student days. He was, it is fair to say, a man who—as a scientist, as teacher, and as a man—was held in the highest esteem, a man who sought, and found, the hearts of his students.

Lewin’s talents extended beyond the purely academic. He had a sophisticated appreciation for the arts, especially for sculpture, and was a skilled sculptor in bronze, who enjoyed making three-dimensional copies of classical Greco-Roman figures. One of his students, W. Rosenstein, wrote in his memoirs (1930) that

characteristic of his multifaceted talents were his deep insights into the fine arts. In him were united a deep understanding for the masterpieces of old with a completely unusual skill in handicrafts. In the intervals between two lectures one could often see him, in a small room off of the auditorium, artfully chiseling away at a bronze sculpture.

Rosenstein recalled that Lewin had an acute intellectual honesty and required it in no lesser degree of his colleagues.

His assessments of other scientists could be cutting, sometimes even scathing, but even so, those who were on the receiving end of his criticisms understood that he was animated by only one desire: the discovery of the truth. If and when his position stood in contradiction to that of the prevailing scientific opinion, neither the number nor the prominence of those who opposed his position could divert him from what he saw as the correct view.

This somewhat harsh judgment of Lewin is echoed by R. K. Müller, who wrote in Lewin’s Festschrift12 that

It is certainly true that, at times, Lewin failed to recognize the limits of his knowledge and was reluctant to admit error even when he was shown to have been wrong. To accept this weakness on his part one must still grant that, more often than not, he was right; still, it was a failing of his. But who among us would keep a reckoning, that a man as brilliant and with such a universality of spirit as Lewin’s would still show weaknesses? On the contrary, they shield us from the tendency to make heroes out of mere historical constructs, which we should guard against in our depiction of men of flesh and blood.

Whether because of professional jealousy or anti-Semitism on the part of his colleagues or, on his part, his prickly disposition or the stubbornness with which he clung to his scientific theories and refused to surrender his religious convictions, relations were not good between the eccentric and independent-minded Lewin and the medical-school faculty of Berlin University. A cartoon from the 1920’s [see page xv], shows Lewin’s isolated position clearly, even though he was one of the most distinguished academics of his time. It shows the renowned faculty of the Berlin University School of Medicine dragging a wagon up a steep hill toward its peak, the peak having on it a signpost labeled, in Latin, To the Greater Glory of Medicine. Marching with his colleagues is the pathologist Otto Lubarsch,13 dean of the medical school faculty at that time. Lubarsch, a Jew, was later to become an apostate and a vocal supporter of the Hitler regime, but his apostasy and vocal anti-Semitism didn’t protect him: during the Nazi regime he was removed from his post as dean. The only faculty member who is not marching up the hill in the van of the wagon, or seated atop it, is Lewin; he is shown seated on a step at the rear of the cart, holding a vial of poison, his back turned to his colleagues.

missing image file

Berlin University Medical School Faculty, 1920’s

Politically, Lewin was a radical, opposed to the ruling Prussian regime, and a strong advocate for Germany’s underclass. He was an associate of August Bebel14 and corresponded with Karl Liebknecht15 on worker-health protection issues and industrial hygiene. He also served on the governing body of the organization that administered the local homeless shelter, serving in that capacity with Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg.16 When the Weimar Republic first came into power in 1918, Lewin welcomed it, but his enthusiasm later changed to disillusionment. Whether he was ever a member of a political party is not known, although he was certainly aligned in his political beliefs with the Social Democrats.

His strong sympathies with the working class undoubtedly originated in his poverty-stricken days as a boy in the Scheunenviertel. Given those sympathies with the downtrodden, it is not surprising that he turned his knowledge of chemistry and toxicology to good use in advocating strongly for protective labor legislation and industrial hygiene. He wrote in the 1922 Deutsche Revue that

Whoever among civilized men owns property which may be dangerous to others has a duty to do his utmost to abate those dangers or to shut them down altogether. The duty is owed not only on legal grounds, but by all those who benefit from wage labor of any kind, whether physical or intellectual.

Lewin repeatedly emphasized this position in his writings, seeking always to protect industrial workers from poisons and other injuries. So it was a logical consequence of Lewin’s thinking on this subject that, in his book, Die Gifte in die Weltgeschichte (Poisons in History,17 in the chapter dealing with the military uses of poison gases, he wrote clearly and unequivocally that

Among men the ugliest of weapons is poison [gas], which reappeared in Europe as a weapon that can wreak destruction from afar, after it had disappeared from Europe for centuries out of reluctance [to use it] on moral grounds.

Lewin went on to say that military necessity can never justify or excuse the use of poison gas. He expressed this point even more precisely a few years later in the fourth edition of his Textbook of Toxicology:

Poisons are disloyal weapons, and whoever uses them, with the intention of inflicting grave harm upon the enemy, is an outlaw power which places itself outside the norms of the law of nations. If ever men in leadership would quietly and dispassionately heed their noblest feelings—which is, unfortunately, inconceivable—then they would be gripped by a sense of shame about all that is perpetrated in the name of what is most hateful in war, and the first and foremost of these is that infamous weapon, poison gas.

Early in 1929, Lewin spoke out at a conference of the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom18 against poison-gas warfare. Despite the illness which was to cause his death some ten months later, Lewin could not pass up the opportunity to participate in this event, to speak clearly and distinctly against the use of poisons for military purposes. His appearance at this conference, in his last year of life, demonstrates Lewin’s combative spirit: he called situations and persons fearlessly as he saw them. Another student, Wolfgang Heubner, said of Lewin that "wasn’t content to be numbered among the satisfied ones [or appeasers]," that he had to be engaged in the daily tumult of life.

Lewin’s earliest books dealt with the effects of alcohol and morphine. He was one of the first scientists to study the medical and biological effects of morphine. Cocaine also interested him. In describing this drug in 1885, he came into conflict with Sigmund Freud, an advocate of the use of morphine and cocaine.19 Lewin was among the first to show that the use of the two drugs in combination was dangerous. Lewin and Freud had other differences as well, relating to the latter’s pioneering work in psychoanalysis. Lewin never understood Dr. Freud, referring to him sarcastically as Joseph the Dream-Interpreter.

His two books, The Side-Effects of Medications (1st ed. 1881, 3d ed. 1899) and his Textbook of Toxicology) (1885, 4th ed., under the title Poisons and Poisonings, Georg Stilke 1929) demonstrate Lewin’s amazing knowledge of medications and poisons. In 1905, he was a co-author, with H. Guillery, of Die Wirkungen von Arzneimittel und Gifte auf der Auge [The Effects of Medications and Poisons on the Eye]. Later came books on blood poisoning, on the detection of the smallest traces of arsenic in the blood and on carbon monoxide poisoning. In the last decade of his life, he presented his wide audience with two especially handsome books: in 1920, Poisons in World History (Berlin, J. Springer), and, in two printings, Phantastica, The Tranquilizing and Excitant Drugs (1924 and 1927),20 the latter a book that tells, in artful language, the story of poisons and their effects on the workings of the mind. These two books were made available again in reprints after World War II.

For many years, Lewin had a particular interest in the effect on the blood of toxins such as hydroxylamine, phenyl-hydroxylamine, phenylhydrazine, and nitrobenzene. Using a spectroscope, he was able to identify the changes in the blood resulting from these toxins, having earlier in his life conducted his own research in this area (published as The Spectroscopy of Blood, 1897).

As a scholar-expert, Lewin enjoyed the highest reputation. He was much sought-after for expert opinions in that branch of forensic sciences that deals with toxins, and published a volume of his opinions on that subject (Leipzig 1912). These opinions were often thought to be controversial, but were motivated by a strong desire to protect workers in the workplace. He was predisposed to use his intellect