Oswald Schmiedeberg

Who was Oswald Schmiedeberg?

Oswald Schmiedeberg was a Baltic German pharmacologist He was also known as the "Father of Modern Pharmacology."

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. Afterwards he was an assistant to Rudolf Buchheim at Dorpat. In 1872 he became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Strasbourg, where he remained for the next 46 years.

His work largely dealt with finding the correlation between the chemical structure of substances and their effectiveness as pharmaceuticals. With his pupil Hans Horst Meyer he discovered glucuronic acid as a conjugation partner in xenobiotic metabolism and later found that glucuronic acid was also a component of cartilage and occurred as a disaccharide of chondroitin sulfate. He 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.