Overton, Charles

The first chemical clue relating the structure of anesthetics to their potency was discovered in 1899 by a pharmacologist, Hans Horst Meyer, and an anesthetist, Charles Ernst Overton. Working independently, Meyer and Overton noted a strong correlation between the polarity of a compound and its potency as an anesthetic. They expressed polarity as the oil/gas partition coefficient, while anesthetic potency was expressed as the partial pressure in atmospheres. Figure 11.10 is a Meyer-Overton correlation for 18 anesthetics used on mice. Note that olive oil is used, and it has become the most commonly used reference solvent. 

R.L. Lipnick (1986). Charles Ernest Overton Narcosis studies and a contribution to general pharmacology. Trends Pharmacol. Sci., 7, 161-164... 

R.L. Lipnick (ed.) (1991a). Charles Ernest Overton Studies of Narcosis and a Contribution to General Pharmacology, Chapman and Hall, London, and Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology... 

QSAR studies date back to the nineteenth century. In 1863, A. F. A. Cros at the University of Strasbourg observed that toxicity of alcohols to mammals increased as the water solubility of the alcohols decreased. In the 1890s, Hans Horst Meyer of the University of Marburg and Charles Ernest Overton of the University of Zurich, working independently, noted that the toxicity of organic compounds depended on their lipophilicity. 

In the early 1900s Hans Meyer and Charles Overton suggested that the potenoy of a substanoe as an anesthetic was directly related to its lipid solubility, or oil/gas partition ooeffioient (4,5). This has oommonly been referred... 

The discovery of a parameter (olive oil/water partition coefficient) upon which a mechanistic interpretation for narcosis could be based was made independently six years later by Charles Ernest Overton at the University of Zurich (30-31) and by Hans Horst Meyer (32) and his collaborator Fritz Baum (33) at the University of Marburg. Prior to this discovery, Walter Dunzelt, a student of Meyer, attempted to confirm the Houdaille data on the relationship between water solubility and minimum toxic concentration, using tadpoles and small fish (34). 

Overton, E., Studien iiher die Narkose, zugleich ein Beitrag zur allgemeinen Pharmakologie, G. Fischer, Jena, 1901 English translation by Lipnick, R. L., ed.. Studies on Narcosis, Charles Ernest Overton, Chapman and Hall, London, 1991... 

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