Dickinson W. Richards

Dickinson Woodruff Richards Jr. was an American physician and physiologist, born in Orange, New Jersey in 1895 and died in 1973. After Hotchkiss School and a Yale degree in 1917, he served as an artillery officer in France and then took his medical degree at Columbia University in 1923. At the Presbyterian Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in New York he worked with André Cournand on pulmonary function and then on catheterization of the heart, which let them study traumatic shock, heart failure and chronic cardiac and pulmonary disease and develop diagnostic techniques for congenital heart disease. For this work he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Cournand and Werner Forssmann. He held the Lambert professorship of medicine at Columbia from 1947, advised the drug company Merck Sharp and Dohme and edited the Merck Manual, and retired from Bellevue and Columbia in 1961.