Dickinson W. Richards

Dickinson Woodruff Richards Jr. was an American physician and physiologist, born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1895. He studied English and Greek at Yale, served as an artillery officer in France in 1918 and 1919, and then trained in medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, where he took his doctorate in 1923. After a stay in London at the National Institute for Medical Research under Henry Dale, he began research on lung and circulatory physiology with Andre Cournand at Bellevue Hospital. Their use of cardiac catheterization to study heart failure and traumatic shock earned Richards, Cournand and Werner Forssmann the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He became Lambert Professor of Medicine at Columbia in 1947.