He studied in Bonn and in Greifswald, a small Prussian university town which had earlier joined the Hanseatic League. He graduated from the University of Strasbourg in 1873.
In 1877, Harmon Northrop Morse synthesized paracetamol at Johns Hopkins University by way of p-nitrophenol with tin in arctic acetic acid.
But it was not until 1887 that clinical pharmacologist Joseph von Mering attempted paracetamol on patients.
In 1893, von Mering issued a document informing on the clinical results of paracetamol with phenacetin, another aniline differential. Von Mering asserted that, unlike phenacetin, paracetamol had a small propensity to produce methemoglobinemia.
Paracetamol was then rejected in favor of phenacetin. It was not until the 1940s that paracetamol was reinvestigated after it was found present in proteins closed with phenacetin.
In 1889 together with Oskar Minkowski, von Mering discovered the direct connection between the pancreas and diabetes which led to the discovery of insulin. They found that the pancreas supplies a hormone essential to glucose metabolism. He reported in 1890 that the surgical removal of the pancreas from a healthy animal would cause diabetes.
Mering joined Naunyn’s Strasbourg Clinic of Internal Medicine, and in 1890 was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine at the outpatient department of Halle, Germany, and in 1900 as full professor of Internal Medicine in Medical Policlinic of Halle.
In 1903, Mering developed the chemicals structure of a drug that might produce sleep. Unable to synthesize the compound himself, he asked the great Emil Fisher at the University of Berlin for help and it was Fisher’s group that created the first of the barbiturates.
Dr. von Mering (28 February 1849, in Cologne – 5 January 1908)
