Nobel Prize Recipient. Philip Showalter Hench received professional recognition after being awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He received 13 nominations for the Nobel candidacy in 1950. With each receiving one third of the monetary prize, he shared the coveted award with Polish-born Swiss chemist, Tadeis Reichstein and Edward Calvin Kendall, colleague at Mayo Clinic. According to the Nobel committee, these men received the award "for their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects." In the mid-1930s Kendall and Reichstein succeeded in isolating and analyzing the composition of a number of similar hormones excreted from the adrenal cortex gland, and later with the input of Hench in the 1940s, this became the basis for cortisone preparations to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammations. Born the son of a scholar educator, he attended private schools as a child. He entered Lafayette College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1916. During World War I, he enlisted in the Medical Corps of the United States Army in 1917. He transferred to the reserve corps to continue his medical training and in 1920 received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Pittsburgh. After a year as an intern at Saint Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh, he became a Fellow of the Mayo Foundation, the graduate school of the University of Minnesota's Department of Medicine. He had an interest in crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis. Between 1928 and 1929, he studied abroad in Germany, at Freiburg University and at the von Müller Clinic in Munich. Successively, he was appointed an assistance in 1923, instructor in the Mayo Foundation in 1928, Assistant Professor 1932, Associate Professor 1935 and, in 1947, Professor of Medicine, becoming director of the Department of Rheumatic Diseases . His experiments with steroids were costly and time-consuming, with him leaving his projects in 1939 to join the army. During World War II, Colonel Hench was chief of the medical services and director of the army's rheumatic center at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He noted that painful arthritis occurred during pregnancy, which led to the hypothesis that the arthritis was caused by a biochemical disturbance, perhaps one involving glandular hormones, rather than by a bacterial infection. In 1935 Kendal had isolated from the cortex of the adrenal gland the Steroid Hormone Cortisone. In the mid-1940s, Hench synthesized the cortisone. On September 21, 1948, Dr. Hench administered 100 mg of the adrenal gland corticosterone Compound E to the 29-year-old female patient at the Mayo Clinic Rochester with positive results. Over time, the side effects of the drug were known, but even into the 21st century, a valuable pain-relieving drug in treating arthritis. This followed with the paper "The Reversibility of Certain Rheumatic and Non-Rheumatic Conditions by the Use of Cortisone or of the Pituitary Adrenocorticotropic Hormone". In 1957, he retired from active practice. Besides his interest in Rheumatic Diseases, he also had a lifelong interest in the history and discovery of Yellow Fever. After his death, his collection of papers was donated to the University of Virginia as the Philip S. Hench-Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection. He was one of the founding members of the American Rheumatism Association, serving as the president in 1940 and 1941. Three American universities awarded Hench an honorary doctorate degree as well as the University of Ireland. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Heberden Medal of the British Society for Rheumatology in 1942; the Lasker Award from the American Public Health System in 1949, the Passano Foundation Award in 1950, and the University of Nebraska Criss Award. Jointly with Kendall, he received the Page One Award of the Newspaper Guild of New York. He was honored on a postmarked cacheted envelope issued by the United States on December 10, 2000. The envelope honored the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Kendall and Hench. In 2001 the Philip Showalter Hench Postage Stamp in Guyana was issued. He married Mary Kahler, heiress of the Kahler Company, an auto part manufactory, and the couple had two sons and two daughters. One of his sons continued with his interest in Rheumatic Disease . He died of pneumonia while on a Jamaican vacation. Although many positive results have arisen from the research laboratories of the Mayo Clinic, as of 2021 Dr. Kendall and Dr. Hench are the only Nobel recipients from the Mayo Clinic.