The Strasbourg School: Schmiedeberg's Students, the Archiv and the Legacy of Pharmacology

When Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838–1921) left Dorpat in 1872 to take the chair of pharmacology at the newly founded university in Strasbourg, experimental pharmacology was a young science practised in a handful of rooms on the edge of the Russian Empire. By the time he was forced to leave Strasbourg after the First World War, nearly half a century later, his pupils held chairs of pharmacology across Europe, in Britain, in the United States and in Japan, and the journal he had co-founded in 1873 had become a central forum of the science. The method his teacher Rudolf Buchheim (1820–1879) had begun at Dorpat — testing drugs by animal experiment and chemical analysis instead of by tradition — had become the way the world studied medicines.

This page follows what came after the founding: the Strasbourg institute as a training ground for some 120 pupils from about 20 countries, the American line that runs through John Jacob Abel to a national society, a journal and crystalline insulin, the spread of the method to Japan, the history of the Archiv, Schmiedeberg’s own later work on how the body changes drugs, his books, and the honours and judgements of historians. The two men’s lives, the Dorpat laboratory and the plant drugs they studied are told on the wing’s companion pages.

Table of Contents

  1. Strasbourg as the World’s Training Ground
  2. One Hundred and Twenty Pupils, Forty Chairs
  3. John Jacob Abel and American Pharmacology
  4. Japan and the Spread Abroad
  5. The Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, 1873
  6. How the Body Changes Drugs: Hippuric Acid and Glucuronic Acid
  7. Urethane, Iron and Schmiedeberg’s Late Chemistry
  8. The Grundriss and the Drugs of Homer
  9. Medals, Nobel Nominations and How Historians Rank Them
  10. The Family Tree from Buchheim to Modern Pharmacology
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. Strasbourg as the World’s Training Ground

Strasbourg became part of the new German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1872 the Kaiser-Wilhelm University was founded there as a showcase of German science. Schmiedeberg, already full professor at Dorpat, was called to its chair of pharmacology and made director of its Pharmacological Institute. He stayed from 1872 until 1918, when all Germans had to leave Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the First World War.

For most of those years his institute was the place a young doctor went to learn experimental pharmacology. Greim’s 2024 biography, given at the German pharmacologists’ Ninth Pharmacologic-Historical Forum, records that in 1887 Schmiedeberg moved into a spacious new institute building planned with the architect Otto Warth (1845–1918). The historians Philippu and Seifert, in their 2023 genealogy of the Strasbourg institute, write that Schmiedeberg “trained most of the professors of his time”, and that the institute played a major role in the growth both of academic pharmacology and of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

What a student learned there

The working method was the one Buchheim had built at Dorpat and Schmiedeberg had sharpened: give a measured amount of a pure substance to an animal or an isolated organ, record what happens with instruments, and use chemistry to find out what became of the substance in the body. Greim notes that Schmiedeberg had visited Carl Ludwig’s physiological institute in Leipzig to learn tools such as the kymograph (a rotating drum that records a pulse or a muscle twitch as a trace) and the isolated frog heart. Pupils came to Strasbourg to learn those techniques, carried out a research project, published it, and took the method home. Koch-Weser and Schechter, writing in 1978, called Schmiedeberg’s Strasbourg years “the making of modern pharmacology” in the title of their history of the institute.

Philippu and Seifert draw a lesson from Dorpat that fits Strasbourg too: what mattered was not a large budget or a central location but brilliant researchers, the right spirit and vision, and academic freedom. Strasbourg was a frontier university in a disputed province, yet for more than four decades it drew students from across the world.

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2. One Hundred and Twenty Pupils, Forty Chairs

Greim counts about 120 pupils from 20 countries who worked with Schmiedeberg, about 40 of whom went on to hold chairs of pharmacology. Philippu and Seifert trace the spread from Strasbourg to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. Several of the names recur through the history of medicine:

A grand-pupil: Otto Loewi

The line did not stop with the pupils. Greim calls Otto Loewi a “grand-pupil” of Schmiedeberg: Loewi spent eleven years with Hans Horst Meyer. In 1921, the year Schmiedeberg died, Loewi published his experiment showing that the vagus nerve slows the frog heart by releasing a chemical substance — work that grew out of the same frog-heart and vagus-nerve questions Schmiedeberg had opened with muscarine in 1869. The substance proved to be acetylcholine, and Loewi shared the 1936 Nobel Prize with Henry Dale; their story has its own wing on this site.

Philippu and Seifert’s companion genealogy of the Tartu (Dorpat) department makes the same point from the other end: the Dorpat institute that Buchheim founded and Schmiedeberg inherited became the root of a family tree whose branches reached most of the world’s early pharmacology departments.

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3. John Jacob Abel and American Pharmacology

The clearest single example of the Strasbourg influence is John Jacob Abel, born on 19 May 1857 near Cleveland, Ohio, and died on 26 May 1938 in Baltimore. According to MacNider’s memoir for the National Academy of Sciences, Abel spent the years from 1884 to January 1891 studying in Europe — at Leipzig, Strassburg, Heidelberg, Vienna, Bern, Würzburg and Berlin. After a winter in Strassburg in 1886–87, he spent the academic year 1887–88 there under the clinicians Adolf Kussmaul and Bernhard Naunyn, the physiological chemist Felix Hoppe-Seyler and Schmiedeberg, and took his MD at Strassburg in 1888. MacNider writes: “It was Schmiedeberg who first aroused Abel’s interest in pharmacological research, particularly in its chemical aspects.”

Michigan and Johns Hopkins

Back in the United States, Abel became lecturer and then professor of materia medica and therapeutics at the University of Michigan from 1891 to 1893 — one of the first chairs of pharmacology in the country. In 1893 he moved to the new Johns Hopkins medical school as professor of pharmacology, a post he held until 1932. Parascandola’s 1982 history describes how Abel built pharmacology at Johns Hopkins on the experimental and chemical lines he had learned in Germany.

A society and a journal

Abel carried the Strasbourg model one step further, into the institutions of a national science. In 1908 he led the founding of the society known today as ASPET, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and in 1909 the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, which he edited from 1909 until 1932. The parallel with Schmiedeberg is close: a teacher, a laboratory, and a journal of his own to give the new science a voice.

Hormones and crystalline insulin

Abel’s own research was chemical in exactly the way MacNider says Schmiedeberg inspired. He worked on the hormone of the adrenal gland, and Parascandola has written separately on Abel and the isolation of epinephrine. In 1926 Abel reported crystalline insulin in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — the hormone, discovered only a few years earlier, obtained for the first time as crystals, evidence that it was a definite chemical substance. Insulin is the hormone missing in type 1 diabetes, which has its own page on this site.

Pohar and Hansson, studying the Nobel archive, describe Abel as the “Founder of American Pharmacology” and count 17 nominations for Nobel Prizes, in physiology or medicine and in chemistry. Like his teacher, he never received the prize.

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4. Japan and the Spread Abroad

The Strasbourg school reached well beyond Europe and North America. Hattori and colleagues, writing in 2023 on the large part German medicine played in the development of experimental pharmacology in Japan, state that Japanese experimental pharmacology was started by Japanese disciples of Schmiedeberg. In the decades after the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s new medical faculties modelled themselves heavily on German universities, and young Japanese physicians travelled to German-speaking laboratories to train; Strasbourg was one of the places where pharmacology was learned.

Country by country

Philippu and Seifert follow the branches from Strasbourg into Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. The pattern was much the same everywhere: a pupil returned home, founded or took over a department, set up the animal-experiment and chemical-analysis methods he had learned, and trained his own students. Abel in Baltimore, Meyer in Austria, Cloetta in Zurich and Cushny in Britain and America are examples of the same process.

From academia to industry

Philippu and Seifert also credit the Strasbourg institute with a major role in the modern pharmaceutical industry. Pupils trained in the testing of drugs on animals and organs became the pharmacologists who tested new medicines for the growing drug manufacturers — Heinrich Dreser’s 1899 paper on acetylsalicylic acid is one example of that kind of work. Schmiedeberg himself developed an iron preparation with a pharmaceutical firm in the 1890s (section 7).

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5. The Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, 1873

A new science needs a place to publish. In 1873, the year after he reached Strasbourg, Schmiedeberg founded the Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie (Archive for Experimental Pathology and Pharmacology) together with the pathologist Edwin Klebs in Prague and the clinician Bernhard Naunyn in Königsberg. Naunyn later became Schmiedeberg’s colleague at Strasbourg and his lifelong friend, and it was near Naunyn in Baden-Baden that Schmiedeberg spent his last years.

The journal’s early volumes read like a record of the founders’ programme. Volume 3 opens with Buchheim’s paper on the active constituent of ergot (pages 1–15), followed directly by Schmiedeberg’s study of the active constituents of foxglove (pages 16–43) — teacher and pupil side by side. In volume 5 (1876) Buchheim published his defence of independent pharmacology institutes, and the hippuric-acid paper by Bunge and Schmiedeberg appeared in volume 6 the same year.

Names and editors

According to Greim and the Freiburg institute’s history, the journal was renamed Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archiv from volume 110 in 1925, after Naunyn’s death, and the words “experimental pathology” were dropped in 1969, leaving the title the journal carries today, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology. Walther Straub succeeded Schmiedeberg as editor and held the post from 1921 to 1944. Starke’s 109-page history of the journal, published in 1998, follows these changes in detail.

The journal still appears, and its pages are where much of the history on this wing was published: the biographies of Buchheim by Toomsalu (2023) and of Schmiedeberg by Greim (2024), Philippu and Seifert’s genealogies of Tartu and Strasbourg, and Pohar and Hansson’s Nobel studies all appeared in the journal that bears Schmiedeberg’s name.

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6. How the Body Changes Drugs: Hippuric Acid and Glucuronic Acid

Schmiedeberg did not ask only what a drug does to the body; he also asked what the body does to the drug. Two pieces of work from the Strasbourg years became landmarks in what is now called drug metabolism — the chemistry by which the body alters foreign substances, often joining them to a small molecule of its own so they can be carried out in the urine.

Hippuric acid, 1876

Hippuric acid is a substance found in urine, especially in the urine of grass-eating animals (its name comes from the Greek for horse). With Gustav Bunge, Schmiedeberg published “Ueber die Bildung der Hippursäure” (On the formation of hippuric acid) in 1876. The Neue Deutsche Biographie summarises the result as showing that hippuric acid is formed in the kidneys — that an organ could itself build a new compound, not merely filter one. Hippuric acid is benzoic acid joined to the amino acid glycine, and the same kind of glycine coupling is how the body handles salicylate from aspirin, as the site’s page on glycine and aspirin metabolism explains.

Glucuronic acid, 1879

Three years later, with his pupil Hans Horst Meyer, Schmiedeberg studied the products that appeared in the urine of animals fed camphor (“Ueber Stoffwechselprodukte nach Campherfütterung”, 1879). Greim credits this camphor work with identifying glucuronic acid as a partner to which drugs are joined in the body. Joining a substance to glucuronic acid, a sugar acid, makes it more water-soluble and easier to excrete. Today glucuronidation is recognised as one of the body’s main routes for clearing many medicines and natural compounds.

Why it mattered

Together these studies helped establish that a drug’s effect depends on what becomes of it after it enters the body. That question — now the science of pharmacokinetics and drug metabolism — became a permanent part of pharmacology, and it fitted the chemical emphasis that Abel and other pupils carried away from Strasbourg.

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7. Urethane, Iron and Schmiedeberg’s Late Chemistry

Sleep, anaesthesia and urethane

Greim and the Neue Deutsche Biographie list sleep and anaesthesia among Schmiedeberg’s research areas, with studies of chloroform, paraldehyde and urethane. His 1885 paper “Ueber die pharmakologischen Wirkungen und die therapeutische Anwendung einiger Carbaminsäure-Ester” (On the pharmacological actions and therapeutic use of some carbamic acid esters) introduced urethane — ethyl carbamate — as a hypnotic, a sleep-inducing drug. It was one of a series of synthetic sedatives explored in the late nineteenth century, as chemistry began to supply drugs that did not come from plants.

Caffeine, the purines and the metals

The same sources record his work on caffeine (its central and peripheral effects), on theophylline and other purine derivatives, on the toxicity of heavy metals, and on nicotine as a blocker of the nerve junctions (ganglia) that carry the vagus nerve’s signal to the heart. Caffeine and theophylline are themselves plant substances, from coffee and tea, so the link to natural products ran through his whole career.

Iron for anaemia

In 1894 Schmiedeberg published “Ueber das Ferratin und seine diätetische und therapeutische Anwendung” (On ferratin and its dietary and therapeutic use). The Neue Deutsche Biographie describes ferratin as an iron preparation against anaemia that he developed with a pharmaceutical firm in the 1890s. Iron deficiency was, and remains, the commonest cause of anaemia; the site’s pages on iron and iron-deficiency anaemia describe the mineral today.

Nucleic acid, chitin and collagen

In old age Schmiedeberg turned increasingly to the chemistry of the body’s own large molecules. His publication list includes work on nucleic acid from salmon milt (1896, with Friedrich Miescher, the discoverer of nucleic acid, and 1899), and papers in 1920 — when he was over eighty and had already left Strasbourg — on chitin, on chondroitin sulphuric acid and on collagen. He kept publishing until close to his death in July 1921.

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8. The Grundriss and the Drugs of Homer

The Grundriss, 1883

Schmiedeberg’s textbook, the Grundriss der Arzneimittellehre (Outline of Materia Medica), appeared in 1883; later editions bore the title Grundriss der Pharmakologie in Bezug auf Arzneimittellehre und Toxikologie (Outline of Pharmacology with Reference to Materia Medica and Toxicology). The change of title tells its own story: the old “doctrine of remedies” had become “pharmacology”.

Drugs and stimulants, 1912

In 1912 he published Arzneimittel und Genußmittel (Medicines and Stimulants), a book on drugs alongside everyday stimulants — a category that in German covers coffee, tea, tobacco and alcohol.

The drugs in the Iliad and the Odyssey, 1918

One of his last books was a work of scholarship rather than experiment: Über die Pharmaka in der Ilias und Odyssee (On the Drugs in the Iliad and the Odyssey), published in 1918, the year he lost his Strasbourg institute. Homer’s epics are among the oldest European texts to mention drugs — the Odyssey, for instance, tells of a drug Helen mixes into wine to banish grief, and of the herb moly that protects Odysseus from Circe’s potion. A pharmacologist turning to these passages at the end of a long career was returning to the oldest layer of materia medica, the remedies known only by tradition, that his own science had set out to test.

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9. Medals, Nobel Nominations and How Historians Rank Them

Honours in his lifetime

According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Schmiedeberg received an honorary LL.D. from Edinburgh in 1884 and an honorary doctorate from Bologna in 1888, and was a corresponding member of academies in Paris, Rome and Berlin.

The Nobel nominations

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine began in 1901, when Schmiedeberg was already 62. Pohar and Hansson’s 2020 study of the “Nobel population” in pharmacology, built on the Nobel archive for 1901–1953 with a focus on Naunyn and Schmiedeberg, counts 18 nominations for Schmiedeberg, placing him among the most-nominated pharmacologists of the period; the Neue Deutsche Biographie gives the figure as 14. He was never awarded the prize. His American pupil Abel, with 17 nominations, shared the same fate, while his grand-pupil Loewi did receive it in 1936.

The Schmiedeberg Medal

The German pharmacological society honours outstanding contributions to the field with its Schmiedeberg Medal, which Greim dates to 1956.

How historians rank the two men

Greim quotes the historians of pharmacology Holmstedt and Liljestrand (1963): “Schmiedeberg was undoubtedly the most prominent pharmacologist of his time.” Greim’s own summary divides the credit between teacher and pupil: Buchheim introduced experimental methods into pharmacology, and Schmiedeberg developed them further. The Tartu anatomist Toomsalu, whose 2023 biography is titled “Rudolf Richard Buchheim, the founder of pharmacology”, argues that by introducing chemical analysis and animal experiment Buchheim laid the foundation of scientific pharmacology. Philippu and Seifert write that pharmacology was founded in Tartu by Naunyn, Buchheim and Schmiedeberg.

Schmiedeberg himself took care that his teacher was not forgotten. In 1911, at the age of 72, he published a 54-page memoir in the Archiv on Buchheim’s life and his importance for the founding of scientific materia medica and pharmacology. The usual verdict, then, is a partnership: Buchheim as the founder who first turned remedies into objects of experiment, Schmiedeberg as the builder who made that method into a worldwide profession.

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10. The Family Tree from Buchheim to Modern Pharmacology

Historians of pharmacology often draw the field as a family tree, and Philippu and Seifert’s twin genealogies of Tartu and Strasbourg do exactly that. A simplified version of the main line looks like this:

What the tree carried

What passed down the branches was a method more than a list of drugs: measure a drug’s effect on a living system, purify the active substance, and follow its chemistry in the body. The questions Schmiedeberg posed — how muscarine slows the heart, how the kidney builds hippuric acid, how camphor is joined to glucuronic acid — led on to chemical neurotransmission, receptor pharmacology and drug metabolism, the foundations on which later figures on this site, among them Loewi and Dale, built their work.

The natural-medicine thread runs through the whole story. Buchheim and Schmiedeberg began with remedies drawn from plants, fungi and animals — ergot, foxglove, the fly agaric, pepper, cod liver oil — and asked what in them acts and how. The Strasbourg school spread that question around the world, and it remains the starting point whenever a traditional remedy is tested in the laboratory today.

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Key Research Papers

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Starke K. A history of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 1998;358(1):1-109. PubMed PMID: 9721010
  6. 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
  7. Pohar M, Hansson N. Between two stools? Pharmacologists nominated for Nobel prizes in "physiology or medicine" and "chemistry" 1901-1950 with a focus on John Jacob Abel (1857-1938). Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2021;394(3):503-513. PubMed PMID: 33057776
  8. Parascandola J. John J. Abel and the early development of pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University. Bull Hist Med. 1982;56(4):512-27. PubMed PMID: 6760940
  9. Parascandola J. Abel, Takamine, and the isolation of epinephrine. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2010;125(2):514-7. PubMed PMID: 20196206
  10. Abel JJ. Crystalline Insulin. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1926;12(2):132-6. PubMed PMID: 16587069
  11. Hattori Y, Ishii K, Yanai K, Endoh M. The large part German medicine has played in the development of experimental pharmacology in Japan. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2023;396(1):35-42. PubMed PMID: 36282300
  12. Taba P, Lees A, Stern G. Erich Harnack (1852-1915) and a short history of apomorphine. Eur Neurol. 2013;69(6):321-4. PubMed PMID: 23549143
  13. Toomsalu M. Rudolf Richard Buchheim, the founder of pharmacology. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2023;396(11):2793-2811. PubMed PMID: 37294428
  14. Bunge G, Schmiedeberg O. Ueber die Bildung der Hippursäure. Archiv für Experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie. 1876;6(3-4):233-255. DOI: 10.1007/bf01830969
  15. Schmiedeberg O, Meyer H. Ueber Stoffwechselprodukte nach Campherfütterung. Hoppe-Seyler's Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie. 1879;3(6):422-450. DOI: 10.1515/bchm1.1879.3.6.422
  16. Schmiedeberg O. Ueber die pharmakologischen Wirkungen und die therapeutische Anwendung einiger Carbaminsäure-Ester. Archiv für Experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie. 1885;20(3-4):203-216. DOI: 10.1007/bf01918291
  17. 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
  18. Meyer HH. Oswald Schmiedeberg. Die Naturwissenschaften. 1922;10(5):105-107. DOI: 10.1007/bf01488534

PubMed Topic Searches

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Further Reading

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Connections

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