Hench, Philip Showalter (1896-1965)

US physician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 with Edward Kendall and Tadeus Reichstein for their work on the structure and biological effects of hormones of the adrenal cortex. Hench developed a cortisone treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

Hench noticed that arthritic patients improved greatly during pregnancy or an attack of jaundice and concluded that a hormone secreted in increased quantity during both these conditions caused the improvement. This turned out to be cortisol, a steroid converted to cortisone in the liver.