ABEL, JOHN J. 1857-1938
Pharmacologist
Far-Ranging Education
Descended from German immigrants John Jacob Abel was born near Cleveland on 19 May 1857, the son of farmer George M. Abel and his wife Mary. At age nineteen he entered the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1883. Abel spent the following year conducting graduate research in biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1884, at the age of twenty-seven, Abel embarked on a study trip to Europe that lasted seven years. During his time abroad Abel trained under the biggest names in pharmacology of that era, including the Germans Bernhard Naunyn, Felix Hoppe-Seyler, and Oswald Schmiedeberg. While on the Continent he received an M.D. from the University of Strasbourg in 1888.
Return to the United States
When he returned to his native country, Abel was offered a faculty position at the University of Michigan. Before Abel could establish a department of pharmacology as he was hired to do, Dr. William Osier asked him to accept the chair of pharmacology at Johns Hopkins. Abel arrived in Baltimore in the fall of 1893. In the late nineteenth century pharmacology was just beginning to develop as a specialty. The rise of chemistry in the first half of the century had demonstrated that organic compounds could be synthesized in the laboratory. Experimentation by European researchers had led to a developing understanding of the body's metabolizing such foreign substances as drugs. As the century came to a close, European investigation focused on how specific drugs worked in the body even as pharmacological studies were in their infancy in America.
Father of American Pharmacology
Abel spent the next thirty-nine years at Johns Hopkins and during those decades helped create the discipline of pharmacology in the United States. Unlike many medical school faculty of his day, whose lectures were based on textbook material, Abel taught his students from original research published in journals and by using laboratory experiences. In December 1900 Abel lost an eye in a lab explosion, but that did not stop his drive to establish pharmacology as an independent discipline in medical schools. He was instrumental in 1905 in the founding of the American Society of Biological Chemists and its Journal of Biological Chemistry. Four years later he was also involved in establishing the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and what later became the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Both journals continue publication today. During the decade Abel also continued his important research on hormones, which he had begun in the late 1890s. He had identified the first adrenal hormone, epinephrine, in 1897. Abel published a simple method for preparing the hormone and its derivatives in 1902. Also called adrenaline, this hormone is important in various nervous system functions.
Abel's Legacy
Abel's many contributions to medicine after the decade included a method of demonstrating the presence of amino acids in the blood and the suggestion for an artificial kidney. His discipline of pharmacology has risen to become one of the most important fields in American medicine. Abel died on 26 May 1938.
Sources:
A. McGehee Harvey, "Pharmacology's Giant: John Jacob Abel," Johns Hopkins Medical Journal, 135 (1974): 245-258;
John Parascandola, The Development of American Pharmacology: John J. Abel and the Shaping of a Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
