George Oliver was a physician practicing in the spa town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire while Edward Albert Schäfer was Professor of Physiology at University College London. In 1918, he prefixed the surname of his physiology teacher, William Sharpey, to his own to become Edward Albert Sharpey Schafer. The canonical story, told by Henry Hallett Dale, who worked at University College London from 1902 to 1904, runs as follows:
Despite this tale being reiterated many times, it is not beyond doubt. Dale himself said that it was handed down at University College and showed some surprise that the constriction of the radial artery was measurable. Of Olivers descendants, none recalled experiments on his son.  Dales report of subcutaneous injections contradicts the concerned parties. Oliver: “During the winter of 1893–4, while prosecuting an inquiry as to … agents that vary the caliber of … arteries … I found that the administration by the mouth of a glycerin extract of the adrenals of the sheep and calf produced a marked constrictive action on the arteries.” Schafer: “In the autumn of 1893 there called upon me in my laboratory at University College a gentleman who was personally unknown to me. … I found that my visitor was Dr. George Oliver, <who> was desirous of discussing with me the results which he had been obtaining from the exhibition by the mouth of extracts from certain animal tissues, and the effects which these had in his hands produced upon the blood vessels of man.” Systemic effects of orally given adrenaline are highly unlikely, so details of the canonical text may be legend.
On March 10, 1894, Oliver and Schafer presented their findings to the Physiological Society in London. A 47-page account followed a year later, in the style of the time without statistics, but with precise description of many individual experiments and 25 recordings on kymograph smoked drums, showing, besides the blood pressure increase, reflex bradycardia and contraction of the spleen. ″It appears to be established as the result of these investigations that the suprarenal capsules are to be regarded although ductless, as strictly secreting glands. The material which they form and which is found, at least in its fully active condition, only in the medulla of the gland, produces striking physiological effects upon the muscular tissue generally, and especially upon that of the heart and arteries. Its action is produced mainly if not entirely by direct action.″
The reports created a sensation. Oliver was fast to try adrenal extracts in patients, orally again and rather indiscriminately, from Addisons disease, hypotension (″loss of vasomotor tone″), Diabetes mellitus and Diabetes insipidus to Graves disease (″exophthalmic goiter″). It seems he adhered to contemporary ideas of organotherapy, believing that powerful substances existed in tissues and ought to be discovered for medicinal use. He immediately went on to extract the pituitary gland and, again with Schafer, discovered vasopressin. In 1903 adrenaline, meanwhile purified, was first used in asthma. The use was based, not on the bronchodilator effect, which was discovered later, but on the vasoconstrictor effect, which was hoped to alleviate the “turgidity of the bronchial mucosa” – presumably vascular congestion and edema. Also as of 1903, adrenaline was added to local anesthetic solutions. The surgeon Heinrich Braun in Leipzig showed that it prolonged the anesthesia at the injection site and simultaneously reduced ″systemic″ effects elsewhere in the body.