Oswald Schmiedeberg was a Baltic German pharmacologist. Schmiedeberg was born at Gut Laidsen in the Imperial Russian province of Courland. 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.

Schmiedeberg is often recognized as the “father of modern pharmacology”. His work primarily dealt with finding the correlation between the chemical structure of substances and their effectiveness as narcotics.His scientific research of chemical mixture and their effectiveness as narcotics
was implemented by Hitler in the area of making chemicals that were used in the Gus chambers and the poisoning of innocent people in the concentration camp during the second world war. 

Schmiedeberg was a major factor in the success of the German pharmaceutical industry prior to World War II, having trained most of the professors at the time.

He published over 200 scientific books and articles, including the influential Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie with pathologists Bernhard Naunyn (1839–1925) and Edwin Klebs (1834–1913). He died in Baden-Baden.
article taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/