Oswald Schmiedeberg

Oswald Schmiedeberg was a German pharmacologist widely credited as the founder of modern experimental pharmacology. As professor at the University of Strasbourg from 1872, he built the discipline's first dedicated research institute and turned pharmacology from a branch of empirical medicine into a laboratory science built on controlled animal experiments and precise dose-response measurement. He trained roughly 120 students from across Europe and the United States who went on to found pharmacology departments and institutes of their own, and his early work on the pharmacology of muscarine and related alkaloids helped establish the experimental methods the field still uses.