Oswald Schmiedeberg

Oswald Schmiedeberg (10 October 1838 – 12 July 1921) was a Baltic German pharmacologist. He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Modern Pharmacology."

Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen (now Laidze parish, Talsi municipality, Latvia) in the Imperial Russian province of Courland. His parents were Wilhelm Schmiedeberg, born 1809 in Windau, Courland, died 1878 in Dorpat, and his wife Lucie Bernard, born 1813 in Lausanne, Switzerland, died 1871. He was the eldest of six siblings. 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 (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.

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.

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. He published over 200 scientific books and articles. With pathologists Bernhard Naunyn (1839–1925) and Edwin Klebs (1834–1913), he was founder of the influential Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie. He died in Baden-Baden.