Louis Lewin

In 1887 he received his first sample of the Peyote cactus from Dallas, Texas-based physician John Raleigh Briggs (1851-1907), and later published the first methodical analysis of it, causing a variant to be named Anhalonium lewinii in his honor.

[2] Louis Lewin's book "Die Nebenwirkungen der Arzneimittel" (1881) deals with the borderline between the pharmacological and the toxicological action of drugs with the untoward or side-effects of all kinds of medicaments.

[5] One of his famous patients were the well-known chemistry professor Alfred Stock (1876-1946), who suffered from mercury poisoning due to occupational exposure.

In 1926 in an article in Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie (Journal of Applied Chemistry), Stock claimed that released mercury from amalgam fillings caused poisoning and demanded the consumption stopped.

One of Lewin's most enduring tasks was to create a system of classification of psychoactive drugs and plants based on their pharmacologic action.