Philip Showalter Hench

Philip Showalter Hench ( born February 28, 1896 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, † March 30, 1965 in Ocho Rios, Jamaica) was an American physician.

Hench studied medicine in Eaton Township (Pennsylvania) and his PhD in 1920 at the University of Pittsburgh. After Medical Assistant Make in Minnesota and later Rochester, he headed from 1926 the local rheumatology clinic. From 1928 to 1930 Hench graduated studies in Munich and Freiburg. As a professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, he investigated predominantly arthritic conditions and pointed out that the clinical pictures of the patients were extremely uneven. From 1935 his friends Kendall and Reichstein isolated the cortisone from the adrenal gland, the Hench in 1948 for the first time a patient with severe arthritis injected, which was free of pain then.

"For their discoveries among the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects " he received in 1950, together with Edward Calvin Kendall and Tadeusz Reichstein received the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1949 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

Hench was for many years president of the American Rheumatism Association.