Dickinson W. Richards

Dickinson Woodruff Richards ( born October 30, 1895 in Orange, New Jersey, † February 23, 1973 in Lakeville, Connecticut) was an American internist. In 1956 Richards along with Werner Forssmann and André Frédéric Cournand the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system ."

Life and work

Richards was the son of a New York lawyer, his mother came from a family of doctors. He studied from 1913 English and Greek at Yale University with a bachelor's degree 1917. Thereafter, he did his military service until 1919 as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army in France. Back in the U.S., he studied medicine at the Medical School of Columbia University with a MA degree in physiology in 1922 and the MD Completion in 1923.

He was at the University Hospital of Columbia University, NewYork- Presbyterian Hospital ( and taught at Columbia University) and conducted research there after spending a year at the Institute of Medical Research in London at Henry Dale on the physiology of the circulatory system. He has worked with Lawrence Henderson from Harvard together and from about 1931 with the French André Cournand at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He was also since 1935 a consultant for Merck, Sharpe and Dohme in New Jersey and gave the Merck Manual out.

Cournand and Richards dealt with various heart and circulatory problems and overcame the right heart for the study of various diseases on. 1945 Cournand published an article on the measurement of cardiac output by means of cardiac catheterization and together with Richards were both working on the use of the developed by Adolf Fick Fick principle for the determination of cardiac output as well as the investigation of the pulmonary circulation. They use the method, for example, in the study of traumatic shock, the effects of heart medications and heart disease, which treatment and diagnosis thereof. They optimized the catheterization and explored their applications first in animal experiments on dogs and chimpanzees, and later also in humans. End of the 1930s they were able to determine complicated and hitherto unknown heart defect and allow treatment. They led the scientifically established method of cardiac output measurement using the right heart catheter in clinical medicine, where they quickly established itself as the standard method. Together with the imaging Angiokardiographie allowed Catheterization comprehensive diagnosis of the heart and, based on the modern cardiology. In 1945, Richards Professor at Columbia University and director of the First Division (Columbia Division ) at Bellevue Hospital and in 1947 he became Lambert Professor of Medicine at Columbia University.

In 1961, he retired in 1963 he was knight of the Legion of Honour. He was married to Constance Burrell Riley since 1931 and had four daughters.