Pharmacology
The People (31)
Pedanius Dioscorides
Greek physician in the Roman army (c. 40–90 AD) whose De Materia Medica described about 600 medicinal plants and guided European pharmacy for 1,500 years.
Read the deep dive →Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
Persian physician-philosopher (c. 980–1037) whose Canon of Medicine catalogued some 800 simple drugs, set rules for testing them, and was taught in European universities for centuries.
Read the deep dive →Paracelsus
Swiss-German Renaissance physician and alchemist (1493–1541) who brought minerals and chemistry into medicine and wrote that only the dose makes a poison.
Read the deep dive →Thomas Sydenham
English physician (1624–1689), the "English Hippocrates", who made his own liquid laudanum, championed Peruvian bark for agues and described diseases at the bedside.
Read the deep dive →William Withering
English physician and botanist (1741–1799) who identified foxglove as a dropsy remedy and published the careful 1785 Account that founded digitalis therapy.
Read the deep dive →Friedrich Sertürner
German pharmacist (1783–1841) who isolated morphine from the opium poppy, the first alkaloid ever obtained from a plant, founding alkaloid chemistry.
Read the deep dive →François Magendie
French physiologist who founded experimental pharmacology, testing plant poisons on animals and bringing pure alkaloids like strychnine and morphine into medicine (1783–1855).
Read the deep dive →Pelletier & Caventou
French pharmacists Pelletier (1788–1842) and Caventou (1795–1877) who isolated quinine from cinchona bark in 1820, along with strychnine and other plant alkaloids.
Read the deep dive →Claude Bernard
French physiologist (1813–1878) who traced curare's paralysis to where nerve meets muscle, explained carbon monoxide poisoning and founded experimental medicine.
Read the deep dive →Buchheim & Schmiedeberg
Saxon-born Rudolf Buchheim and Baltic-German Oswald Schmiedeberg founded experimental pharmacology at Dorpat and Strasbourg, testing plant drugs and isolating muscarine from fly agaric.
Read the deep dive →Heinrich Caro & Paul Guttmann
German dye chemist Heinrich Caro synthesised methylene blue (1876); physician Paul Guttmann, with Paul Ehrlich, used it in 1891 as the first synthetic antimalarial.
Read the deep dive →Paul Ehrlich
Physician and dye chemist (1854–1915) who shared the 1908 Nobel for work on immunity and created Salvarsan for syphilis, the first magic-bullet drug.
Read the deep dive →Carl Koller
Austrian-born ophthalmologist (1857–1944) who in 1884 showed that cocaine from the coca leaf numbs the eye, founding local anesthesia.
Read the deep dive →John Jacob Abel
American pharmacologist John Jacob Abel (1857–1938) founded the first US pharmacology chair, studied epinephrine, crystallised insulin and built an early artificial kidney.
Read the deep dive →Felix Hoffmann
German industrial chemist (1868–1946) who in 1897 synthesised acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin, in pure stable form, continuing the willow-bark salicylate lineage.
Read the deep dive →Loewi Dale
German-born pharmacologist Otto Loewi and English scientist Henry Dale proved that nerves pass their signals with a chemical, acetylcholine, settling the sparks-versus-soup debate (Nobel 1936).
Read the deep dive →Gerhard Domagk
German pathologist (1895–1964) who found Prontosil, the first sulfa drug to cure spreading bacterial infection; Hitler's 1937 decree forced him to refuse his 1939 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Daniel Bovet
Swiss-born Italian pharmacologist Daniel Bovet (1907–1992), who pioneered the antihistamines and the synthetic curare-like muscle relaxants used in surgery (unshared Nobel 1957).
Read the deep dive →Albert Hofmann
Swiss chemist (1906–2008) who made ergot medicines for childbirth bleeding, synthesised LSD, and isolated psilocybin from Mexican mushrooms.
Read the deep dive →Katz Euler Axelrod
Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod explained how nerve endings release, store and recapture their chemical messengers, the reuptake antidepressants target (Nobel 1970).
Read the deep dive →Rudolf Fritz Weiss
German internist (1895–1991) who turned plant medicine into a teachable science with his Lehrbuch der Phytotherapie and served on Commission E.
Read the deep dive →Russell Marker
American chemist who turned Mexican wild-yam diosgenin into cheap progesterone through the Marker degradation, founding the Mexican steroid hormone industry (1902–1995).
Read the deep dive →Howard Florey & Ernst Chain
Australian pathologist Howard Florey (1898–1968) and German-born British biochemist Ernst Chain (1906–1979), who turned Fleming's mould penicillin into a working medicine at Oxford.
Read the deep dive →Black Elion Hitchings
James Black, Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings designed drugs from biochemical reasoning, giving beta-blockers, H2 blockers and drugs for gout, leukaemia and herpes (Nobel 1988).
Read the deep dive →Earl Sutherland
American physician-scientist (1915–1974) who discovered cyclic AMP, the second messenger that carries a hormone's signal inside the cell, winning the 1971 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →John Cade
Australian psychiatrist (1912–1980) whose 1949 report on lithium salts for mania, begun after his Changi captivity, launched modern mood-stabiliser treatment.
Read the deep dive →Henri Laborit
French naval surgeon (1914–1995) whose search for an anti-shock drug in anaesthesia brought chlorpromazine into psychiatry and opened the antipsychotic era.
Read the deep dive →Tu Youyou
Chinese pharmaceutical chemist who isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood after reading an ancient medical text closely, receiving the 2015 Nobel Prize for this antimalarial.
Read the deep dive →Gilman Rodbell
Martin Rodbell inferred and Alfred Gilman purified the G proteins that relay hormone signals inside cells, the switch behind roughly a third of drugs (Nobel 1994).
Read the deep dive →John Vane
English pharmacologist John Vane (1927–2004), who showed in 1971 that aspirin works by blocking prostaglandin production, sharing the 1982 Nobel Prize for prostaglandin research.
Read the deep dive →Furchgott Ignarro Murad
Three American pharmacologists, Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad, showed that the gas nitric oxide signals blood vessels to relax (Nobel 1998).
Read the deep dive →The story of pharmacology, the science of how medicines act on the body, told through the people who built it. It begins with the plant healers: Dioscorides’ herbal of about 600 remedies, Avicenna’s Canon, Paracelsus and “the dose makes the poison”. It runs through the age of plant alkaloids, when morphine, quinine and digitalis were drawn out of opium, cinchona bark and foxglove, and through the first laboratories of pharmacology in the nineteenth century, aspirin from the willow-bark tradition, and methylene blue, the first synthetic antimalarial. It reaches the years after the Second World War, with penicillin, lithium, chlorpromazine and hormones made from wild yam, and ends with the Nobel laureates who explained how drugs work at the level of cells and receptors. Cards are ordered by the years of each person’s work.
Connections
- All Notable Doctors
- Infection and Microbiology
- Genetics and Molecular Biology
- Immunology and Immunotherapy
- Metabolism and Nutrition
- Cell Biology and Physiology
- Neuroscience and the Senses
- Medical Technology and Surgery
- Nutrition and Orthomolecular
- Contemporary Practitioners
- Public Health and Institutional Medicine