Oswald Schmiedeberg (October 10, 1838 – July 12, 1921) was a Baltic German pharmacologist.
Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen in the Imperial Russian province of Courland. In 1866 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Dorpat with a thesis concerning the measurement of chloroform in blood.[1] 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.
Schmiedeberg is often recognized as the "father of modern pharmacology".[2] His work primarily dealt with finding the correlation between the chemical structure of substances and their effectiveness as narcotics. With his pupil Hans Horst Meyer he discovered glucuronic acid as a conjugation partner in xenobiotic metabolism and later found that glucuronic acid also was a component of cartilage and occurred as a disaccharide of chondroitin sulfate. He also 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.[1] He published over 200 scientific books and articles, including the influential Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie with pathologists Bernhard Naunyn (1839–1925) and Edwin Klebs (1834–1913). He died in Baden-Baden.
Bäumer Beatrix: Schmiedeberg, Johann Ernst Oswald. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). Band 23. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, p. 227 f. (German)