Background
Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen (now Laidze parish, Talsi municipality, Latvia) in the Imperial Russian province of Courland.
Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen (now Laidze parish, Talsi municipality, Latvia) in the Imperial Russian province of Courland.
University of Tartu.
He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Modern Pharmacology."
He was the eldest of six siblings. In 1866 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Dorpat with a thesis concerning the measurement of chloroform in blood. 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.
His work largely dealt with finding the correlation between the chemical structure of substances and their effectiveness as pharmaceuticals. He 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 World War II, having trained most of the professors at the time.
He published over 200 scientific books and articles He died in Baden-Baden.