History of Pharmacology

History of Pharmacology

Pharmacology in its current concept as an analytical-experimental natural science has existed in Germany only since the middle of the 19th century. Previously, the subject was dependent and variously combined with botany, pharmacognosy, chemistry, pharmacy, general pathology, polyclinics and history of medicine.

Today, around 30,000 known diseases can be cured with drugs. Diagnostics, therapies and vaccines are available. Pharmacists, doctors, chemists and biologists can rely on different methods when manufacturing or researching mechanisms of action. All scientific disciplines are represented, from genetics, biotechnology and computer-aided synthetic drug design to molecular biology and behavioral pharmacology.

The current understanding of the structure of the organism, its organs, its cells and molecular processes is still relatively new (hardly more than 200 years old), but the basic molecular biological methods have only been developed in the last 40 years. This is how Sherrington defined the term synapse in nerve cells in 1911.

Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493 - 1541), began to challenge traditional doctrines. He called for the findings that make the medicine effective and defended himself against senseless mixtures of substances or medieval medicine. He was the first to discover the narcotic effect of ether. He prescribed chemically defined substances so successfully that he was accused of poisoning out of envy. He argued against the charge: "If you want to explain every poison, then what is poison? All things are poison and nothing (is) without poison, only the dose makes a thing that is not poison."

100 years later, Johan Jakob Wefper was the first to specifically use animal experiments to confirm claims of pharmacological or toxicological assumptions. In this age of enlightenment, science became increasingly important. In 1806, the chemist Sertuner succeeded in isolating morphine from the milky sap of the opium poppy as the first pure substance. In 1847, Rudolph Buchheim founded the first university institute for pharmacology in Dorpat, today's Tartu, Estonia. Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838 - 1921) together with his students, twelve of whom were appointed to departments of pharmacology, contributed to a high reputation. Together with internist Bernhard Naunyn, he founded the first regularly published journal for pharmacology, which is still published today (Naunyn-Schmiedeberg archive of pharmacology). After 1920, pharmacological research centers were established alongside university institutes in the rapidly developing pharmaceutical industry. After 1960, many universities established departments of clinical or specialty pharmacology (including neuropharmacology).