Historical Tidbit: Philip Showalter Hench, MD (February 28, 1896-March 30, 1965)
Submitted by Alan D. Rogol, MD, Ph.D
Philip Hench administered cortisone to several patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis just after his colleague at the Mayo clinic, Edward Kendall had synthesized it (Mayo Clin Proc 1949; 24:181-197). Hench, along with Kendall, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1950 with the Swiss biochemist Thaddeus Reichstein, who had purified the hormone years earlier, for “discoveries related to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects”. It was only following the remarkable expansion of the use of cortisone for many additional inflammatory diseases did medicine learn the long-term adverse events including adrenal suppression induced by the doses of cortisone or similar drugs when administered at many fold the physiologic dose.