Peter Lewis followed undergraduate chemistry at Oxford with a DPhil thesis on the kinetics of bacterial growth. He joined the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory (1948), working on sodium and potassium flux in squid nerves with Richard Keynes. He studied diurnal rhythms on MRC-funded research trips to Spitzbergen. Working with the histologist, Charles Shute, he then turned to the cholinesterases that became central to his career, publishing landmark papers in Brain (1967) on cholinesterase-containing fibres in the rat brain. He continued his cholinergic work when he returned to The Physiological Laboratory (1970), with additional wide-ranging research interests including spectral sensitivity curves, monoamines, placental esterases and weeping lubrication in mammalian joints. A medical society founded (2007) in his college, Corpus Christi, was named the Lewis Society of Medicine by unanimous decision.

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