Nobel Prize Recipient. Dickinson Woodruff Richard, an American physiologist received world recognition for being awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared this honor with French-American physician and physiologist, André Frédéric Cournand, and a German surgeon, Werner Forssmann. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the three men received the award "for their discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system." He received one single nomination for the Nobel candidacy. Born the son of a lawyer, he received his early education at a private preparatory school, before entering Yale University and earning an A.B. degree, majoring in English and Greek in 1917. He received the highest award for a Greek student at Yale. Both of his grandfathers and three uncles had been physicians. During World War I, he joined the United States Army, and after a period as an instructor in artillery during 1917 to 1918, he served as an artillery officer in France until the end of the war. Later after the war, he studied at Columbia University of College of Physicians and Surgeons receiving his M.A. degree in 1922 and his M.D. in 1923. After a hospital internship and studying on a research fellowship at the National Institute for Medical Research in England, he returned to Columbia University in 1928 and taught there from 1947 to 1961. In 1961 he retired from this Chair and became Emeritus Lambert Professor. From 1935 onwards, he was medical adviser for the pharmaceutical company of Merck & Company in New Jersey. While working in the Tuberculosis Service of the Columbia University Division at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, he became the supervising professor of Cournand, who had been researching the idea of cardiac catherization before coming to the United States in 1930. Richards had been researching lung disease and traumatic shock. The two men used Forssman's method of cardiac catheterization, and improving it, thus being able to measure the blood pressure within the heart. After World War II, Richards and Cournand demonstrated the importance of catheterization to the diagnosis of heart and lung diseases. They were recognized for their work using a thin tube to explore the interior of the functioning human heart, which was the precursor to today's interventional cardiology practices. Working with many colleagues, he and Cournand established a cardiopulmonary laboratory at Bellevue Hospital before World War II. This laboratory was where most of the clinical research was performed, and where the two pioneered the conceptual merger of the heart and lung into a single organ. Active in professional publications, he was an Editor of "The American Review of Tuberculosis," and was also on the Editorial Board of "Medicine" and of the AHA journal "Circulation" during the 1950's. Late in his retirement, he published "Medical Priesthoods and Other Essays," which contained lectures he believed to be entertaining and to express his general ideas on medicine and the physiology of the heart and lungs, as well as on other topics. In 1931 he married and the couple had four daughters. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the John Phillips Memorial Award of the American College of Physicians in 1960, the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1963, the Trudeau Medal in 1968, and the Kober Medal of the Association of American in 1970. Throughout his entire career, he neglected to emphasize his own role in research and preparing publications. Although offered honorary doctorate degrees from a host of universities, he accepted only from his alma mater, Yale University, and Columbia University. Each time he received an honor, his acceptance speech would be praising colleagues who had collaborated with him. According to his obituary, he died at home of a sudden heart attack.