Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Arch Pharmacol (2006) 373: 139 DOI 10.1007/s00210-006-0050-9 EDITORIAL Martin C. Michel An anthology from Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology Published online: 24 March 2006 # Springer-Verlag 2006 Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Archives of Pharmacology has been published since 1873, originally under the name Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie. With more than 130 years of publishing history, this makes it the oldest existing pharmacology journal in the world. However, as with any human being, it is not age but rather merit that determines the value of a journal. In this respect Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Archives of Pharmacology has every reason to be happy with its past as many fundamental findings in our discipline have primarily been published in it. On the occasion of the International Union of Pharma- cology meeting held in Munich in 1998, a history of the journal was published (Starke 1998). In the times of Medline and Google searches, however, science preceding the internet age is sometimes ignored. This is a pity because many important lessons can be learned from earlier studies, particularly as they made up for limited tools with elegant study designs. In this vein, the journal will start to publish a series of comments on important contributions to pharmacology published in it. Each of these articles will contain a short biographical sketch of the original author and a summary of the original paper (particularly since many of the older ones were published in German) and will describe how these papers have shaped and continue to shape our thinking. The present issue contains the first of this series (Lammers et al. 2006), highlighting a ground-breaking paper by Paul Trendelenburg (1917). In this case the authors of the commentary have made an admirable effort to translate the entire study into English. Given the extraordinary importance of the original Trendelenburg study, it may also be of interest to readers of the print version of the journal to see this translation. Later contributions in this series will not be accompanied by a full translation, but an electronic version of the original article (most of which predate the internet age) will be made available on the journal’ s website. We hope that many readers will enjoy reading these historical perspectives and will take inspiration from them. If the present technologies meet the elegance of the earlier studies we can only be optimistic about the future of pharmacology. References Lammers WJEP, Lammers-van den Berg AM, Morrison JFB, Petroianu GA (2006) Translating Trendelenburg; back to the future. Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Arch Pharmacol (this issue) Starke K (1998) A history of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Archives of Pharmacology. Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’ s Arch Pharmacol 358: 1–109 Trendelenburg P (1917) Physiologische und pharmakologische Versuche über die Dünndarmperistaltik. Arch Exp Pathol Pharmakol 81:55–129 M. C. Michel (*) Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy, Academic Medical Center, Unversity of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: m.c.michel@amc.uva.nl