A physician who freed millions of patients from the prison of pain. Philip Hench did not discover a miracle drug – he found a way for the body to heal itself.
An Observation Worth a Nobel Prize
Hench looked where others did not want to. At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, he saw patients with deformed, swollen joints every day. Rheumatoid arthritis showed no mercy. Doctors could at most alleviate pain, while the disease progressed inexorably.
But Hench noticed something strange. A pregnant woman suddenly felt better. A patient with jaundice stopped doubling over in pain. This was not a coincidence. This was a lead. There had to be some substance that the body produces under special circumstances. Something that shut down the destructive attack of the immune system on its own joints.
This young rheumatologist did not like to surrender. He completed his studies in Pittsburgh in 1920, went through military hospitals, arrived at the Mayo Clinic at the age of twenty-seven. Just three years later, he headed the Department of Rheumatic Diseases. He knew the answer lay somewhere in the body’s chemistry. He suspected adrenal cortex hormones.
The Collaboration of Two Persistent Men
Edward Kendall was a biochemist. He had a laboratory full of test tubes and the patience of a saint. In the 1930s, he isolated several compounds from the adrenal cortex. One of them he modestly labeled with the letter E. Compound E. Without fanfare, without promises.
Hench and Kendall had been talking since 1930. The hypothesis was tempting: perhaps this very substance switches off inflammation? But Compound E was devilishly difficult to obtain. Expensive raw materials, complicated synthesis, minuscule amounts of product. And then war broke out. Hench returned to uniform, this time as a lieutenant colonel. Research froze for five years.
When he took off his colonel’s uniform in 1946, he returned to the interrupted trail. Kendall finally obtained a sufficient amount of the substance. In 1948, they administered it to the first patients. The effect exceeded the boldest expectations. People who had not been able to bend their fingers for years suddenly began walking without pain. Cortisol worked like an antidote to the disease.
The Price of Triumph
The Nobel Prize in 1950 was merely confirmation of what the medical world already knew. Hench shared it with Kendall and Swiss chemist Reichstein. All three deciphered the secret of adrenal hormones. But the real question appeared later: what next?
Cortisol proved to be a double-edged sword. It alleviated symptoms but did not cure the cause. Long-term use produced side effects. Hench did not like to talk about this publicly, though he perfectly understood the limitations of his discovery. He gave patients relief, not salvation. That was still more than anyone before him had achieved.
He married the daughter of a friend of one of the Mayo Clinic founders. He had four children; his son followed in his footsteps. But Hench was interested not only in rheumatology. He collected documents on the history of jaundice. This disease, which once set him on the trail of cortisol, fascinated him until the end of his life. His collection went to a library in Virginia and bears his name.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1950/hench/biographical/
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philip-Showalter-Hench
- https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)62495-6/fulltext
- https://www.jrheum.org/content/38/12/2664
Rory Thornfield
Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.
His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.
Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.
Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.