Oswald Schmiedeberg

Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838–1921), together with his many disciples (12 of whom were appointed to chairs of pharmacology), helped to establish the high reputation of pharmacology.

Fundamental concepts such as structure-activity relationship, drug receptor, and selective toxicity emerged from the work of, respectively, T. Frazer (1841–1921) in Scotland, J.Langley (1852–1925) in England, and P. Ehrlich (1854–1915) in Germany. Alexander J.Clark (1885–1941) in England first formalized receptor theory in the early 1920s by applying the Law of Mass Action to drug-receptor interactions. Together with the internist, Bernhard Naunyn (1839–1925), Schmiedeberg founded the first journal of pharmacology, which has since been published without interruption. The “Father of American Pharmacology”, John J. Abel
(1857–1938) was among the first Americans to train in Schmiedeberg‘s laboratory and was founder of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (published from 1909 until the present).

Status Quo
After 1920, pharmacological laboratories sprang up in the pharmaceutical industry, outside established university institutes. After 1960, departments of clinical pharmacology were set up at many universities and in industry.