(1896-1965) US physician who introduced cortisone treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, for which he shared the 1950 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Edward Kendall and Tadeus Reichstein.
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.