The evolution of experimental pharmacology as a biological science: the pioneering work of Buchheim and Schmiedeberg

摘要

The term 'pharmacology' as we understand it today seems to have been defined for the first time in 1791 by the German chemist and physician Friedrich Albrecht Karl Gren (1760-1798) when he distinguished between 'pharmacology as the science of the action of drugs' and 'materia medica as the de-scrption and collection of drugs'. His contemporary and friend, Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), Professor of Medicine at Halle University, believed not only that drugs affected the body but, conversely, that the body altered the composition of drugs, an idea which anticipated the present term 'drug metabolism'. Reil also established some rules on how to perform trials on the efficacy of drugs, namely, using patients with a defined diagnosis, standardizing the experi-mental test conditions, describing symptoms by special tech-nical terms, and repeating an individual experiment. However, these considerations were not followed by application in drug trials which he performed. Rather, Reil seems only to have analyzed the empirical work carried out by others, putting forward a theory of drug testing (Beitrag zu den Prinzipien fur jide kuenftige Pharmakologie, i.e. Contribution to the principles of a future pharmacology, 1799). The most impressive ex-amples of scientific trials of therapeutic measures known at that time were the studies of James find on the effect of lemons in scurvy (publication 1753), of William Withering on the foxglove (1785), and of Edward Jenner on vaccination against smallpox (1798).