Otto Loewi, 1873-1961

Abstract

Otto Loewi, born on 3 June 1873, in Frankfurt am Main, was the son of Jakob Loewi, a wine-merchant of that city, by his wife, Anna Willstaedter. Throughout his life Otto retained very happy memories of his childhood and schooldays. For the nine years from 1881 to 1890 he attended in Frankfurt a Gymnasium of the old style, in which the studies were centred on the classical languages—Latin being studied for the whole nine and Greek for the six later years. He accepted for himself the not unfamiliar view that such an emphasis in education, during the formative years of boyhood, would have had a specially favourable influence on his personality, and on his general attitude to life and learning. In an ‘autobiographic sketch’, published in the year before he died, he recorded that, during these nine years at the Gymnasium, he obtained ‘fairly good marks’ in these literary subjects, but ‘poor marks’ in physics and mathematics. Without attempting to assess the respective shares in the result, of inborn aptitudes and of a particular educational routine, it may at least be accepted as a fact, that Loewi exhibited in later life an unusually wide range of knowledge and interests, for one whose main career and activities were concerned with one faculty of the natural sciences.