John Jacob Abel: Life and Career of the Father of American Pharmacology

John Jacob Abel (1857–1938) is the man historians keep calling the “Founder of American Pharmacology.” He was the son of German immigrants near Cleveland, a small-town schoolteacher who married a fellow teacher and spent their joint savings on seven years of study in the laboratories of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He came home in 1891 to the first professorship of pharmacology in the United States — in an empty room without a single test tube — and two years later moved to the brand-new Johns Hopkins medical school, where he spent the rest of a long working life. When he died in Baltimore in 1938 he was still at the bench, planning the next experiment.

This page tells the story of the man rather than the chemistry: his family and schooling, the European teachers who shaped him (above all Oswald Schmiedeberg in Strassburg), the bare Ann Arbor room of 1891, Osler’s letter and the move to Hopkins, his habit of teaching over lunch, the strain of the First World War on a German-trained scientist, his retirement to the Laboratory for Endocrine Research, and the honours that came to him. His epinephrine and insulin work, the natural sources he drew on, and his artificial kidney and journals each have their own page in this wing, linked below.

Table of Contents

  1. A Palatinate Family near Cleveland
  2. Michigan, La Porte and Mary Hinman
  3. Seven Years in the Laboratories of Europe
  4. Schmiedeberg and the Strassburg Doctorate
  5. Ann Arbor, 1891: A Chair with No Test Tubes
  6. Osler’s Letter and the New Johns Hopkins
  7. Teaching at the Lunch Table
  8. War, Loyalties and a German Training
  9. Retirement, the Endocrine Laboratory and the Last Years
  10. Honours, Medals and Nobel Nominations
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Palatinate Family near Cleveland

John Jacob Abel was born on 19 May 1857, “near Cleveland, Ohio,” in the words of his National Academy of Sciences biographer, the pharmacologist William deB. MacNider. His family came from the Rhine Valley of the Palatinate, the wine-growing country of south-western Germany along the river Rhine. Later reference accounts give his parents’ names as George M. Abel and Mary (Becker) Abel, both German immigrants.

The details of his boyhood are thin in the published record. What the memoirs make plain is the shape of the background: a German immigrant family settled near Cleveland, and a young man who would later move with ease between American and German universities. That double inheritance — an American upbringing and a German cultural root — is a thread that runs through the whole of his life, from the years he chose to spend studying in Germany to the difficulty he felt when the two countries went to war in 1917.

Abel’s generation of American physicians and scientists grew up at a time when the United States had almost no laboratory medicine of its own. Anyone who wished to learn experimental physiology, chemistry or pharmacology properly had to cross the Atlantic. Abel would do exactly that, and his life is in many ways the story of how the German laboratory tradition was carried back to America and planted there.

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2. Michigan, La Porte and Mary Hinman

Abel studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which awarded him the degree of Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy) in 1883. His path through college was not a straight line. During his undergraduate years he broke off his studies for an interval of three years to earn a living in La Porte, Indiana. MacNider’s career outline lists him as principal of the La Porte high school in 1879–1880 and then as superintendent of the town’s public schools from 1880 to 1882. As principal he taught a broad spread of subjects — mathematics, Latin, chemistry and physics.

In La Porte he met Mary Hinman, a fellow teacher from New York State. They married on 10 July 1883, the year he finished his Michigan degree. According to MacNider, it was their combined savings that paid for the long years of study that followed. Mary went with him to Europe and remained his companion for nearly fifty-five years of marriage.

A year with Newell Martin

Before sailing for Europe, Abel spent the academic year 1883–1884 as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, working in physiology under H. Newell Martin. Johns Hopkins was then a young university, opened in 1876 as an American experiment in German-style graduate research; its medical school did not yet exist and would not open until 1893. Martin’s physiology laboratory was one of the few places in the country where a student could see experimental biology done in the European manner. It was Abel’s first taste of the institution that would later become his home for forty-five years.

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3. Seven Years in the Laboratories of Europe

In 1884 the Abels left for Europe, and they did not come back until January 1891 — about seven years in all. MacNider’s memoir traces an itinerary that reads like a roll call of nineteenth-century German-language science. Abel was not content to learn one subject from one master; he moved from university to university, taking physiology, chemistry, pathology, clinical medicine and pharmacology from the leading teacher in each.

Leipzig, 1884–1886

His first two years were spent in Leipzig. There he studied physiology under Carl Ludwig and Max von Frey, histology under Wilhelm His, pharmacology under Rudolf Boehm, pathology under Adolf Strümpell and chemistry under Johannes Wislicenus. Ludwig’s institute was then one of the most famous physiological laboratories in the world, and it was in Ludwig’s laboratory that Abel began the experimental work that became his doctoral dissertation.

Strassburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg

In the winter of 1886–1887 he moved to Strassburg (today Strasbourg, then part of the German Empire), where he attended the teaching of the physician Adolf Kussmaul and the pathologist Friedrich von Recklinghausen. A summer in Heidelberg followed, with the neurologist Wilhelm Erb and the surgeon Vincenz Czerny, and he also worked in the clinics at Würzburg. In 1887–1888 he was back in Strassburg, now under Kussmaul, Bernhard Naunyn, the physiological chemist Felix Hoppe-Seyler and the pharmacologist Oswald Schmiedeberg — the meeting that would decide the direction of his career (section 4).

Vienna, Berne and Berlin

Abel also took clinical medicine in Vienna with Hermann Nothnagel, and after his degree he spent 1889–1890 in Marceli Nencki’s biochemical laboratory in Berne, Switzerland, and also worked in Berlin. Nencki’s laboratory was a centre for the chemistry of the body’s own substances, and the training Abel received there in isolating and purifying compounds from animal tissue foreshadowed his later hunt for pure hormones.

At Berne he met a young Scot, Arthur Robertson Cushny, who was then a student in Hugo Kronecker’s laboratory. The two became lifelong friends. Cushny would succeed Abel at Michigan, and when Cushny died in 1926 Abel wrote a long memorial essay, “Arthur Robertson Cushny and pharmacology,” for the journal Science.

The same years brought grief. An infant daughter born to John and Mary Abel died in Strassburg on 30 October 1888. Two sons, George and Robert, survived to adulthood.

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4. Schmiedeberg and the Strassburg Doctorate

Abel received his MD from the University of Strassburg in 1888. His dissertation was a piece of nerve physiology, begun in Ludwig’s laboratory, on the “negative variation” of the nerve current — the electrical change that travels along a nerve when it fires — studied in the spinal nerve roots of the frog.

The more lasting result of Strassburg, however, was the influence of Oswald Schmiedeberg. Schmiedeberg, the pupil of Rudolf Buchheim, had turned the old study of materia medica — the cataloguing of drugs, many of them plant remedies — into an experimental laboratory science, in which the action of a drug on the living body was measured and its active substance was isolated and characterised. His Strassburg institute trained a generation of pharmacologists from many countries. MacNider states plainly that it was Schmiedeberg who first aroused Abel’s interest in pharmacological research, and particularly in its chemical side: the question of what, chemically, a drug or a tissue extract actually contains.

That chemical bent became Abel’s signature. Where many physiologists were content to describe what an extract did, Abel wanted the pure substance in a bottle — the crystalline compound responsible for the effect. It is the thread that links his later work on the adrenal hormone epinephrine, on insulin, on the pituitary, on toad venom and on the poisons of the death cap mushroom, each told on the companion pages of this wing.

Schmiedeberg’s influence was practical as well as intellectual. When the University of Michigan was looking for a professor in 1890, it was on Schmiedeberg’s recommendation that the offer went to Abel. Abel thus stands in a direct line of teachers: Buchheim to Schmiedeberg, Schmiedeberg to Abel, and Abel to the many American pharmacologists he trained. The founders of that line are profiled on this site’s Buchheim and Schmiedeberg page.

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5. Ann Arbor, 1891: A Chair with No Test Tubes

In the summer of 1890, on Schmiedeberg’s recommendation to Victor C. Vaughan of Michigan’s medical faculty, Abel was offered the chair of Materia Medica and Therapeutics at his old university. He returned from Europe and began teaching at Michigan in January 1891, first as lecturer (January to June 1891) and then, from 1892 to 1893, as Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics. The historians Pohar and Hansson describe it as the first full professorship of pharmacology in the United States.

The title was grand; the facilities were not. Years later Abel described his arrival in a letter to his former student C. W. Edmunds, quoted in MacNider’s memoir:

“I was given the opportunity of starting the first professorship in pharmacology in the United States … There was no laboratory of any kind at my disposal. There was not a scrap of apparatus, not even a test tube, a flask or a beaker.”

Abel set about turning the old lecture-based subject into a laboratory one. In the German model he had absorbed, medical students did not merely memorise lists of drugs and doses; they watched drugs act on living tissue and learned how active principles were extracted from their plant and animal sources. A 1963 study of his Michigan years, by Swain, Geiling and Heingartner, is titled simply “John Jacob Abel at Michigan: the introduction of pharmacology into the medical curriculum” — which sums up what those two and a half years achieved.

His stay was short. In 1893 he left for Baltimore, and the Michigan chair passed to his friend from Berne, Arthur Cushny, who carried the laboratory approach forward before later moving to London and Edinburgh.

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6. Osler’s Letter and the New Johns Hopkins

The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was about to open its doors in 1893, built from the start around full-time laboratory science and the teaching hospital. Its founding faculty included the pathologist William H. Welch and the physician William Osler. According to MacNider, it was in response to a letter from Osler that Abel accepted the professorship of pharmacology in the new school, taking up his duties in 1893. He stayed for the rest of his life.

Two subjects in one department

At first Abel carried two fields. From 1893 to 1908 he was responsible for both pharmacology and biological chemistry (what is now called biochemistry). In 1908 the two subjects were separated: Walter Jones became the first head of biological chemistry, and Abel kept pharmacology alone from 1908 until his retirement in 1932. The historian John Parascandola’s 1982 study of the department, “John J. Abel and the early development of pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University,” traces how the young department took shape under him.

A builder of institutions

From his Baltimore laboratory Abel became one of the organisers of American laboratory medicine. He proposed to Hopkins president Daniel Coit Gilman, in 1895, the journal that became the Journal of Experimental Medicine; he co-founded the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1905; he called the 1906 meeting that formed the American Society of Biological Chemists; and on 28 December 1908 he gathered eighteen pharmacologists in his own laboratory to found the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, with himself as president. The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics followed in 1909, and he edited it until July 1932. That story — and the artificial kidney he built in the same laboratory in 1913 — is told on the artificial kidney, journals and legacy page.

The research itself ranged widely over the next four decades: the adrenal hormone he named epinephrine, beginning with an 1897 paper with Albert C. Crawford; the posterior pituitary; a toad venom and a mushroom poison; crystalline insulin in 1926. These are covered on the epinephrine and crystalline insulin and natural sources pages.

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7. Teaching at the Lunch Table

Abel’s teaching style was informal to the point of being unusual. MacNider records that he held no formal seminar for his staff. Instead, the department’s real teaching took place at lunch: the staff ate together, and over the meal Abel and his associates talked through their experiments, the literature and the problems of the day. For the young people around him, the lunch table was where they learned how a senior scientist thought.

He also held firm views on training. According to MacNider, Abel was opposed to specialised doctorates in pharmacology. His own preparation had been broad — physiology, chemistry, pathology and clinical medicine across half a dozen universities — and he appears to have believed that a pharmacologist needed that breadth, grounded above all in chemistry and medicine, rather than a narrow degree in a single subject.

The Abel school

The results showed in his students. MacNider names among Abel’s students and associates Albert C. Crawford (his partner on the first epinephrine paper), Thomas B. Aldrich, Reid Hunt, Carl Voegtlin, Arthur S. Loevenhart, Leonard G. Rowntree, B. B. Turner, David I. Macht, E. M. K. Geiling, E. K. Marshall Jr., Vincent du Vigneaud and K. K. Chen. Several went on to found or lead departments and laboratories of their own; Hunt became the first secretary of the pharmacology society Abel founded; du Vigneaud later received the 1955 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on the pituitary hormones oxytocin and vasopressin; Chen is remembered for his studies of ephedrine, the active principle of the Chinese herb ma huang. Through such students, the laboratory pharmacology Abel had learned in Strassburg spread across American medical schools.

Several of these associates also became Abel’s memorialists. After his death, Voegtlin wrote a long memoir in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Marshall wrote the obituary in Science, and in later decades Geiling co-wrote a study of Abel’s Michigan years while Marshall described the exhibit for the centenary of his birth.

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8. War, Loyalties and a German Training

For a scientist of Abel’s background, the First World War was a personal ordeal. He was American-born, but his family came from the Palatinate, his professional formation was almost entirely German, and his teachers and many of his friends were German scientists. MacNider writes that this German training and family origin “made it difficult for Professor Abel to accept America’s conflict with Germany in World War I.”

The memoir does not go further than that sentence, and this page does not either. The difficulty was common to a whole generation of American scientists who had trained in Germany at a time when German universities led the world in laboratory medicine; when the United States entered the war in 1917, the admiration they felt for their teachers sat uneasily beside national loyalty. Abel stayed at his post in Baltimore and kept working.

His research in those years turned to the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland. In 1917, with Maurice C. Pincoffs, he published a study of albumoses (protein breakdown products) in extracts of the posterior pituitary, the start of more than a decade of work on what the pituitary’s puzzling extracts actually contained. The science of that work is described on the natural sources page.

The war did not cut his links with Europe for long. In 1920 the University of Cambridge gave him an honorary LL.D., and he was in time elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. His friendship with Cushny, by then a professor in Britain, continued until Cushny’s death in 1926.

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9. Retirement, the Endocrine Laboratory and the Last Years

In July 1932, at the age of 75, Abel retired from the chair of pharmacology. His former student E. K. Marshall Jr. succeeded him, and he gave up the editorship of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at the same time. Retirement did not mean leaving the laboratory. He became Director of the Laboratory for Endocrine Research at Johns Hopkins, a post he held until his death.

Tetanus toxin

In his last six years Abel took up a new problem: how the toxin of the tetanus bacterium (Clostridium tetani, then called Bacillus tetani) travels to the central nervous system. In 1934 he published a two-part account in Science, “On poisons and disease and some experiments with the toxin of the Bacillus tetani,” and the work continued until his final paper in 1938. The disease itself is described on this site’s Tetanus page.

Mary’s death and his own

Mary Hinman Abel, his wife since 1883 and the partner whose savings had paid for the European years, died on 20 January 1938. Abel died just over four months later, on 26 May 1938, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, of a coronary thrombosis, a week after his eighty-first birthday. MacNider records that only hours before his death he had been planning, with an associate, the continuation of their tetanus-toxin experiments. He was survived by his sons, George H. Abel of Philadelphia and Robert Abel of Boston.

The obituaries came from the leading pharmacologists of two countries. Henry Dale wrote the notice for the Royal Society’s Obituary Notices of Fellows; Carl Voegtlin wrote a long memoir for the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the journal Abel had founded; and E. K. Marshall Jr. wrote the obituary in Science.

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10. Honours, Medals and Nobel Nominations

Recognition came to Abel steadily from the 1910s onward. MacNider’s memoir and the reference literature list:

Seventeen Nobel nominations

The prize that eluded him was the Nobel. Working through the Nobel archives, the historians Pohar and Hansson found that Abel was nominated seventeen times between 1925 and the late 1930s, in two categories: five times for the Prize in Chemistry (1925–1927) and twelve times for the Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He never won. In their account, the chemist Einar Hammarsten, who evaluated the nominations for the Chemistry committee, judged that the hormone work did not merit the prize, in part because others had made more important discoveries in the same fields — for epinephrine, Jokichi Takamine and Thomas Aldrich had isolated the crystalline hormone in 1901. Their paper’s title, “Between two stools?”, points to the problem of a pharmacologist whose work fell between the medicine and chemistry prizes.

Remembered

Pohar and Hansson note that Abel has been “repeatedly referred to as the ‘Founder of American Pharmacology.’” The centenary of his birth in 1957 was marked with an exhibit, described by E. K. Marshall Jr. in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. A. McGehee Harvey called him “Pharmacology’s giant” in a 1974 essay, and R. J. Anderson’s 2009 biographical essay in Molecular Interventions styles him “the fifth horseman.” His papers, held at Johns Hopkins, have been described by R. A. Becker as primary sources for the history of American pharmacology. How the journals, society and students he left behind shaped the field is told on the legacy page.

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Key Research Papers

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Swain HH, Geiling EM, Heingartner A. John Jacob Abel at Michigan. The introduction of pharmacology into the medical curriculum. Med Bull (Ann Arbor). 1963;29:1-14. PubMed PMID: 13979597
  4. Abel JJ. Arthur Robertson Cushny and pharmacology. Science. 1926;63(1638):507-15. PubMed PMID: 17739266
  5. Abel JJ. Chemistry in relation to biology and medicine with especial reference to insulin and other hormones. Science. 1927;66(1710):307-19. PubMed PMID: 17797869
  6. Abel JJ, Pincoffs MC. On the Presence of Albumoses in Extracts of the Posterior Lobe of the Hypophysis Cerebri. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1917;3(8):507-17. PubMed PMID: 16576252
  7. Abel JJ. On poisons and disease and some experiments with the toxin of the Bacillus tetani. Science. 1934;79(2039):63-70. PubMed PMID: 17798140
  8. Dale HH. John Jacob Abel, 1857 - 1938. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1939;2(7):577-585. DOI: 10.1098/rsbm.1939.0019
  9. Voegtlin C. John Jacob Abel 1857-1938. J Pharmacol Exp Ther. 1939;67(4):373-406. DOI: 10.1016/s0022-3565(25)08103-0
  10. Marshall EK. John Jacob Abel. Science. 1938;87(2269):566-569. DOI: 10.1126/science.87.2269.566
  11. Marshall EK Jr. An exhibit at the centennial celebration of John Jacob Abel’s birth. Bull Hist Med. 1958;32(4):356-65. PubMed PMID: 13573011
  12. Harvey AM. Pharmacology’s giant: John Jacob Abel. Johns Hopkins Med J. 1974;135(4):245-58. PubMed PMID: 4606906
  13. Anderson RJ. John Jacob Abel: the fifth horseman. Mol Interv. 2009;9(2):52-60. PubMed PMID: 19401535
  14. Becker RA. The John Jacob Abel papers--primary sources for the history of American pharmacology. Pharm Hist. 1982;24(3):115-6. PubMed PMID: 11615884

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22John+Jacob+Abel%22
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Abel+JJ%5Bau%5D+AND+1890%3A1938%5Bdp%5D
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=history+of+pharmacology+Johns+Hopkins
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Schmiedeberg+pharmacology+history

Further Reading

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Connections