Meyer, Hans Horst, 1853-1939

Professor at the Vienna Medical School, 1904-1924.

Hans Horst Meyer holds a prominent place at the historical intersection of pharmacology and anesthesia. His greatest achievement was in the formulation of the lipoid theory of narcosis which still stands today largely unchallenged. Published in 1899, Meyer's classic paper proposed that the ability of a substance to produce narcosis or anesthesia is governed by its partition coefficient. He shares the honor as the cofounder of this theory with Charles Overton who independently arrived at the same conclusion at the same time although indirectly through a study of permeability of plant and animal cells to various substances. The Meyer-Overton theory stimulated decades of research to answer important questions of exactly how certain drugs can act to produce a state of anesthesia. [Taken from Trent Associates Report 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 1-2]

Meyer was born in Insterburg, East Prussia, and studied medicine in Königsberg, Leipzig, and Berlin. He held the chair of pharmacology at the University of Marburg from 1884 to 1904, and was then professor at the Vienna Medical School from 1904 to 1924, when he retired. Meyer died in Vienna in 1938.

Meyer had three sons, Kurt Heinrich, Arthur Woldemar, and Friedrich Horst. Arthur Meyer's son, J. Horst Meyer, was a professor of physics at Duke University from 1959 to 2004.