Across the USA and Canada in 1887

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.