Oswald Schmiedeberg

Oswald Schmiedeberg (October 10, 1838 – July 12, 1921) was a Baltic German pharmacologist.

Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen in the Imperial Russian province of Courland. In 1866 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Dorpat with a thesis concerning the measurement of chloroform in blood.^[1] Afterwards he was an assistant to Rudolf Buchheim (1820–1879) at Dorpat (Tartu). In 1872 he became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Strasbourg, where he remained for the next 46 years.

Schmiedeberg is often recognized as the "father of modern pharmacology".^[2] His work primarily dealt with finding the correlation between the chemical structure of substances and their effectiveness as narcotics. With his pupil Hans Horst Meyer he discovered glucuronic acid as a conjugation partner in xenobiotic metabolism and later found that glucuronic acid also was a component of cartilage and occurred as a disaccharide of chondroitin sulfate. He also studied the composition of hyaluronic acid and explored its relationship to collagen, amyloid and chondroitin sulfate. In 1869 he demonstrated that muscarine had a similar effect on the heart as electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve. He also demonstrated the hypnotic properties of urethane.

Schmiedeberg was a major factor in the success of the German pharmaceutical industry prior to World War II, having trained most of the professors at the time.^[1] He published over 200 scientific books and articles, including the influential Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie with pathologists Bernhard Naunyn (1839–1925) and Edwin Klebs (1834–1913). He died in Baden-Baden.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "A brief history of pharmacology". Modern Drug Discovery, American Chemical Society. 2001. http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/mdd/v04/i05/html/05timeline.html. Retrieved 2007-04-02. 
2. ^ Lightman, Alan P. (2005). The discoveries: great breakthroughs in twentieth-century science, including the original papers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. pp. 178. ISBN 0676977898. 

External links

• Meyer, Hans H. (1922). "Oswald Schmiedeberg". Die Naturwissenschaften 10 (5): 105–107. doi:10.1007/BF01488534. 
• Kochweser, J; Schechter, P (1978). "Schmiedeberg in Strassburg 1872–1918: The making of modern pharmacology". Life Sciences 22 (13–15): 1361–1371. doi:10.1016/0024-3205(78)90099-1. PMID 351320. 
• Muscholl, E (2001). Schmiedeberg, Oswald. doi:10.1038/npg.els.0003617. 

Bäumer Beatrix: Schmiedeberg, Johann Ernst Oswald. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). Band 23. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, p. 227 f. (German)

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Name	Schmiedeberg, Oswald
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Date of birth	October 10, 1838
Place of birth
Date of death	July 12, 1921
Place of death