Rudolf Buchheim and Oswald Schmiedeberg: Two Lives from Dorpat to Strasbourg

Pharmacology — the experimental science of how drugs act on the living body — was not born in a great capital. It was born in a small university town on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire, Dorpat (today Tartu, in Estonia), in the hands of two men whose lives were tied together as teacher and pupil. Rudolf Buchheim (1820–1879), a physician’s son from Saxony, arrived in Dorpat in 1847 and began testing remedies by experiment instead of by tradition. Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838–1921), a forester’s son from the Baltic province of Courland, studied under him, wrote his doctoral thesis in his laboratory, took over his institute and then carried the new science to Strasbourg, where he trained a large share of the world’s first generation of pharmacology professors.

This page tells the two biographies side by side: where each man came from, how Buchheim reached a professor’s chair at twenty-seven, how Schmiedeberg rose from Dorpat schoolboy to the most famous pharmacologist of his age, how each spent his last years, and how the pupil remembered the teacher in a long memoir of 1911. The science itself — the Dorpat laboratory, muscarine from the fly agaric mushroom, foxglove and the other plant drugs, and the Strasbourg school — is told on the wing’s companion pages and appears here only in passing.

Table of Contents

  1. A Physician’s Son from Bautzen
  2. Leipzig, Ernst Heinrich Weber and the Pereira Translation
  3. A Chair in Dorpat at Twenty-Seven
  4. A Forester’s Son from Courland
  5. Pupil and Successor: Schmiedeberg’s Dorpat Years
  6. Buchheim at Giessen, 1867–1879
  7. Strasbourg, 1872: A New University and a New Institute
  8. The Man in the Grey Coat
  9. Honours, Nobel Nominations and the Last Years in Baden-Baden
  10. Timeline of Two Lives
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Physician’s Son from Bautzen

Rudolf Richard Buchheim was born on 1 March 1820 in Bautzen, a town in the Kingdom of Saxony, according to his entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), the standard German biographical dictionary. Medicine ran in the family. His father, Christian Buchheim (1781–1838), was the town and district physician; his mother, Amalia, born Bruchmann (1793–1824), died when he was a small child, and his father died in 1838, when Rudolf was eighteen.

Growing up in a doctor’s household in the 1820s and 1830s meant growing up with the medicine of the time: a large stock of plant extracts, mineral salts and traditional preparations, prescribed largely on the strength of long custom and the authority of textbooks. Which of these remedies actually did anything, and how, was hardly ever tested. That gap — between what a remedy was believed to do and what could be shown in an experiment — was the problem Buchheim would spend his working life on.

Very little is recorded about his boyhood beyond these family facts. Most of what is known about him comes from the record of his posts, his papers, and the long memoir his pupil Schmiedeberg wrote about him in 1911 (section 9).

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2. Leipzig, Ernst Heinrich Weber and the Pereira Translation

Buchheim studied medicine first at the medical-surgical academy in Dresden and then at the University of Leipzig. In Leipzig he worked in physiological chemistry under Ernst Heinrich Weber, one of the leading physiologists of the day, and took his medical doctorate in 1845. The pharmacologists and historians Athineos Philippu and Roland Seifert, in their 2023 genealogy of the Dorpat department, and the NDB agree on this outline.

While still in Leipzig he took on a task that shaped his whole career. The most up-to-date textbook of materia medica (the older name for the study of remedies) was then an English one, by Jonathan Pereira. Buchheim translated it into German — but not word for word. According to the Russian pharmacologist K. M. Reznikov, who has written the fullest English-language account of Buchheim’s method, he dropped the drugs he judged useless and added newer ones, so that the German edition became partly his own book. The exact years of this work are given differently by different historians; it belongs to the late 1840s, with Reznikov dating a two-volume Lehrbuch der Arzneimittellehre based on Pereira to 1846–1848.

Weeding a textbook in this way required a judgement about which remedies worked, and Buchheim soon found that the existing literature could not supply one. His own Lehrbuch der Arzneimittellehre (textbook of materia medica) followed in the 1850s — the NDB dates it to 1856, Philippu and Seifert to 1853–1856 — and reached a third edition in 1878. The story of how he set out to test remedies himself belongs to the Dorpat years and is told on the Dorpat laboratory page.

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3. A Chair in Dorpat at Twenty-Seven

In 1847 Buchheim was appointed extraordinary (associate) professor at the Imperial University of Dorpat, then a German-language university in the Russian Empire’s Baltic provinces. His teaching assignment was broad by modern standards: pharmacology (materia medica), dietetics, the history of medicine and medical literature. He was promoted to ordinary (full) professor in 1849. Reznikov stresses that he was appointed when he was only 27 years old. According to the Tartu anatomist M. Toomsalu, author of a 2023 illustrated biography, he came at the invitation of Professors E. A. Carus and Friedrich Bidder; among his colleagues were Bidder, the anatomist and physiologist, and the chemist Carl Schmidt.

Dorpat was not a comfortable place to do laboratory science. Toomsalu notes that electricity reached the town only in 1892 and the railway in 1876, and that in winter ice sometimes covered the inner walls of the Old Anatomical Theatre. Historians including Philippu and Seifert and Reznikov describe how Buchheim, with little money but gifted students, set up a laboratory for experiments on drugs in his own house at his own expense — the laboratory they and the Freiburg pharmacology institute call the first experimental pharmacology institute in the world. Toomsalu has revisited those details, tracing where the laboratory stood after Buchheim moved house in 1852 and until purpose-built rooms in an annex to the Old Anatomical Theatre were finished in 1860.

Over the next twenty years Dorpat produced, by the counts of different historians, some 80 to 90 doctoral dissertations and about a hundred experimental studies under Buchheim. The NDB calls the institute the first real one of its kind and the model for those founded later. What happened inside it is the subject of the companion page on the Dorpat laboratory.

Buchheim stayed for two decades. According to the NDB, Philippu and Seifert, and Reznikov, he turned down calls from other universities, including Breslau in 1863, before accepting one from Giessen at the end of 1866.

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4. A Forester’s Son from Courland

Oswald Schmiedeberg was born in 1838 at Laidsen (Latvian Laidze) in Courland, a Baltic province of the Russian Empire that is today part of Latvia. His birth date appears in two forms: the NDB and the German pharmacologist Helmut Greim (in a 2024 biographical lecture) give 29 September 1838, while Philippu and Seifert give 11 October 1838. The two dates are the same day — 29 September by the old Julian calendar then used in the Russian Empire is 11 October by the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe.

His family background was modest. The NDB records his father as Wilhelm Ludwig Schmiedeberg (born 1809), a forester, and his mother as Lucie, a lady’s maid. Schmiedeberg never married. A forester’s son grows up among plants, game and the country year, and the habits stayed with him: as an old professor he still spent August in his Baltic homeland and enjoyed fishing and hunting (section 8).

He was sent to school in Dorpat — the district school from 1852 to 1854 and the Gymnasium from 1855 to 1859, according to the NDB and Greim — and then studied medicine at the University of Dorpat from 1860 to 1866. That put him, from the age of fourteen, in the same small town as Buchheim’s growing institute.

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5. Pupil and Successor: Schmiedeberg’s Dorpat Years

Schmiedeberg took his medical doctorate in 1866 under Buchheim. His thesis, according to the NDB and Greim, dealt with the quantitative measurement of chloroform in the blood — a practical question at a time when chloroform anaesthesia was barely twenty years old, and a characteristic Buchheim project: a drug, a measurement, and the body’s chemistry.

The steps that followed came quickly. He was assistant at the Dorpat pharmacological institute from 1866 to 1868, completed his habilitation (the qualification to teach at a German-language university) in 1868, and became extraordinary professor in 1869. In 1869, according to Greim, he visited Carl Ludwig’s physiological institute in Leipzig to learn experimental tools such as the kymograph (a rotating drum that records pulse and blood pressure as a curve) and the isolated frog heart. Those tools mattered at once: in the same year he and his colleague Koppe published their book on muscarine, the poison of the fly agaric mushroom, whose effects on the frog heart are described on the muscarine and plant-drugs page.

When Buchheim left for Giessen in 1867, Schmiedeberg took over the Dorpat institute; he became full professor in 1871. The sources word the succession slightly differently — Greim says he succeeded Buchheim as director after his habilitation, and the Freiburg institute’s history gives his Dorpat directorship as 1867–1872 — but all agree that the pupil inherited the teacher’s laboratory. Philippu and Seifert list the founders of pharmacology in Tartu as Naunyn, Buchheim and Schmiedeberg, and Greim sums up the handover in one line: Buchheim introduced experimental methods, and Schmiedeberg developed them further.

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6. Buchheim at Giessen, 1867–1879

Calls from Giessen and Bonn reached Buchheim at the end of 1866, according to Reznikov, and in 1867 he moved to the University of Giessen, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, as ordinary professor of pharmacology. (Some sources give 1866; the NDB and Philippu and Seifert give 1867.) He kept working and writing.

From Giessen he published in the new Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie that Schmiedeberg had co-founded in 1873, including a paper on the active constituent of ergot and others on the “pharmacological groups” of piperine and atropine. In 1872 he set out his view of how materia medica related to organic chemistry, and in 1876 he answered the surgeon Theodor Billroth, who had argued against separate pharmacological institutes, with a paper on the tasks and position of pharmacology at the German universities. In 1879 he wrote two papers for the Archiv der Pharmazie on the place of pharmacy at the universities and on pharmacognostic systems. These works are covered on the Dorpat page and the plant-drugs page.

Rudolf Buchheim died in Giessen on 25 December 1879, at the age of 59. Philippu and Seifert record the cause as a heart disease followed by paralysis. By then his former pupil had held the Strasbourg chair for seven years and was already the better-known of the two.

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7. Strasbourg, 1872: A New University and a New Institute

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Alsace became part of the new German Empire, and in 1872 a new German university was founded at Strasbourg (Strassburg), the Kaiser-Wilhelm University. It was meant as a showpiece and recruited ambitious young professors. Schmiedeberg, at thirty-three, was called there as professor of pharmacology and director of the Pharmacological Institute.

The following year, 1873, he joined the pathologist Edwin Klebs and the clinician Bernhard Naunyn in founding the Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, a journal devoted to the new science; it is still published today as Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology. Naunyn remained his close friend for life (section 9). In 1887, according to Greim, Schmiedeberg moved into a spacious new institute building he had planned with the architect Otto Warth (1845–1918).

From that building flowed the “Strasbourg school”. Greim counts about 120 pupils from 20 countries, about 40 of whom went on to hold chairs of pharmacology; Philippu and Seifert write that Schmiedeberg trained most of the professors of his time. Among them were John Jacob Abel, who took the subject to the United States, and Hans Horst Meyer, who took it to Vienna. That story — the pupils, the journal and the metabolism research — is told on the Strasbourg school page.

Schmiedeberg stayed in Strasbourg from 1872 until the end of the First World War — nearly half a century. (Greim speaks of over 42 years; the NDB of 46.) He made Strasbourg the place that ambitious young pharmacologists from Europe, America and Japan came to.

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8. The Man in the Grey Coat

The most vivid picture of Schmiedeberg comes from Wolfgang Heubner, who worked in Strasbourg from 1903 to 1908 and later became a professor of pharmacology himself. Writing in 1956, Heubner described his old chief, as Greim summarises him, as a man of medium height with full grey hair, a round full beard and a broad, round nose, who wore a grey suit with long tails and a black Borsalino hat. He spent March in Italy and August in his Baltic homeland, and he enjoyed fishing and hunting. Heubner’s own verdict, in the English that Greim reproduces, was: “To me his persona was imposing and absolutely original.”

Two habits stand out from this portrait. The yearly return to the Baltic kept the forester’s son in touch with the countryside he came from, half a continent away from his laboratory. And the spring journeys to Italy fit a man with wide cultural interests: one of his last books, published in 1918, was a study of the drugs mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

His standing among his colleagues was exceptional. Greim quotes the historians Holmstedt and Liljestrand (1963): “Schmiedeberg was undoubtedly the most prominent pharmacologist of his time.” His textbook, the Grundriss der Arzneimittellehre (outline of materia medica, 1883), went through several editions under a later title, Grundriss der Pharmakologie in Bezug auf Arzneimittellehre und Toxikologie, and in 1912 he published a book on medicines and stimulants (Arzneimittel und Genußmittel).

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9. Honours, Nobel Nominations and the Last Years in Baden-Baden

Honours

According to the NDB, Schmiedeberg received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1884 and an honorary doctorate from Bologna in 1888, and he was a corresponding member of the academies in Paris, Rome and Berlin. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine began in 1901, and he was nominated for it repeatedly: the medical historians Pohar and Hansson, who studied the Nobel archive for pharmacologists nominated between 1901 and 1953, count 18 nominations (the NDB gives 14). He was never awarded the prize. Long after his death the German pharmacological society established a Schmiedeberg Medal, which Greim dates to 1956, for outstanding contributions to the field.

The memoir of his teacher, 1911

In 1911, more than thirty years after Buchheim’s death, Schmiedeberg published a 54-page memoir in the journal he edited: “Rudolf Buchheim, his life and his importance for the founding of scientific materia medica and pharmacology”. It is the pupil’s tribute to the teacher who had given him his start and his laboratory, and it remains a primary source — Toomsalu draws on “Schmiedeberg’s memories” in her 2023 biography of Buchheim. That the most celebrated pharmacologist of the day gave so many pages to his teacher says a good deal about how he saw the origins of his own science.

Leaving Strasbourg

The end of the First World War ended Schmiedeberg’s Strasbourg career. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, and, as Greim writes, all Germans had to leave in 1918/1919. Schmiedeberg, then about eighty, left the institute he had built and settled in Baden-Baden, close to his old friend Bernhard Naunyn. His late interests had turned to chemistry: Crossref lists papers by him on chitin, chondroitin sulphuric acid and collagen as late as 1920.

Oswald Schmiedeberg died in Baden-Baden on 12 July 1921, aged 82. His pupil Hans Horst Meyer wrote his obituary in Die Naturwissenschaften in 1922. The journal he had co-founded took the names of its two founders, becoming Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archiv from volume 110 in 1925, after Naunyn’s death.

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10. Timeline of Two Lives

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Key Research Papers

  1. Toomsalu M. Rudolf Richard Buchheim, the founder of pharmacology. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2023;396(11):2793-2811. PubMed PMID: 37294428
  2. Philippu A, Seifert R. History of pharmacology: 1-the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Tartu (Dorpat): genealogy and biographies. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2023;396(1):5-17. PubMed PMID: 36413339
  3. Greim H. Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838-1921) : Ninth Pharmacologic‑Historical Forum, 2024, Munich, Germany. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2024;397(12):9591-9596. PubMed PMID: 39042158
  4. Philippu A, Seifert R. History of pharmacology:2 - The Institute of Pharmacology of the University of Strasbourg: genealogy and biographies. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2023;396(1):19-33. PubMed PMID: 36520164
  5. Scheindlin S. Our man in dorpat: Rudolf Buchheim and the birth of pharmacology. Mol Interv. 2010;10(6):331-5. PubMed PMID: 21263158
  6. Muscholl E. Second W.D.M. Paton Memorial Lecture. The evolution of experimental pharmacology as a biological science: the pioneering work of Buchheim and Schmiedeberg. Br J Pharmacol. 1995;116(4):2155-9. PubMed PMID: 8564242
  7. Kuschinsky G. The influence of Dorpat on the emergence of pharmacology as a distinct discipline. J Hist Med Allied Sci. 1968;23(3):258-71. PubMed PMID: 4875593
  8. Koch-Weser J, Schechter PJ. Schmiedeberg in Strassburg 1872-1918: the making of modern pharmacology. Life Sci. 1978;22(13-15):1361-71. PubMed PMID: 351320
  9. Pohar M, Hansson N. The “Nobel Population” in Pharmacology: Nobel Prize laureates, nominees and nominators 1901-1953 with a focus on B. Naunyn and O. Schmiedeberg. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2020;393(7):1173-1185. PubMed PMID: 31953675
  10. Schmiedeberg O. Rudolf Buchheim, sein Leben und seine Bedeutung für die Begründung der wissenschaftlichen Arzneimittellehre und Pharmakologie. Archiv für Experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie. 1911;67(1):1-54. DOI: 10.1007/bf02012802
  11. Meyer HH. Oswald Schmiedeberg. Die Naturwissenschaften. 1922;10(5):105-107. DOI: 10.1007/bf01488534
  12. Reznikov KM. Pharmacological vector of Rudolf Buchheim. Research Results in Pharmacology. 2019;5(1):103-116. DOI: 10.3897/rrpharmacology.5.32234

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Rudolf Buchheim
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  3. PubMed: Dorpat pharmacology history
  4. PubMed: Strasbourg pharmacology history

Further Reading

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Connections

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