Acetylcholine - From Vagusstoff to Cerebral Neurotransmitter

This paper is concerned with some of the events in physiology that followed Otto Loewi's description of a substance that he named Vagusstoff; events that led eventually to the establishment of acetylcholine as a transmitter substance in the nervous system. Much of the work achieving this recognition of acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter took place in the middle third of the twentieth century; a period that witnessed the dislocation of many people as a result of National Socialist policies in Germany, that country's expansionist conquests, and the Second World War. A few of the people who were obliged to emigrate from Europe played prominent roles in these discoveries. This paper describes some of their achievements and, in a way, pays tribute to them.