Background
Dickinson Woodruff Richards was born on October 30, 1895 in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Dickinson Woodruff Richards, a lawyer, and Sally Lambert.
Dickinson Woodruff Richards was born on October 30, 1895 in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Dickinson Woodruff Richards, a lawyer, and Sally Lambert.
He received a classical education in English, Greek, and history at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, graduating in 1913. He went on to Yale University, receiving his B. A. in 1917. Three months after graduating from Yale, he joined the United States Army, and during his two years of service he became a lieutenant and served in France with the American Expeditionary Force. Following his return to the United States, Richards entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York City. He received his M. A. in physiology in 1922 and his M. D. in 1923. He completed his internship and residency at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
From 1927 to 1928 he was a Columbia University research fellow at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, England, working with Sir Henry Dale, an experimental physiologist.
Upon his return from London, Dr. Richards began his teaching career as an associate in medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and as an assistant physician at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center.
Richards settled down to a career as a teacher and researcher. He also began a thirty-year association with his colleague André Cournand. Cournand delineated his relationship with Richards, whom he describes as a "physiologist, physician, medical leader, historian, humanist and man, " in an unpublished 1975 lecture. Richards's accomplishments in physiology and physiopathology are also described in Cournand's autobiography, From Roots to Late Budding.
Richards and Cournand studied the work of the German physician Werner Forssmann, who had successfully shown in 1929 that it was possible to study the heart by passing a catheter through his own arm into the right chamber of his heart. They began by working on dogs and chimpanzees, and over a fifteen-year period they perfected the techniques of cardiac catheterization and the measurement of cardiac out-put and blood gases, which proved to be a valuable tool in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Cardiac catheterization was used by Richards during World War II when, as chairman of the National Research Council Subcommittee on Shock, he and his colleagues were asked by the government to study patients admitted to Bellevue Hospital with "battlefield shock" and measure the efficacy of digitalis and other cardiac drugs. The catheterization method was also used to diagnose so-called blue babies, to identify congenital heart lesions, and in the study of chronic pulmonary disease.
In 1945, Richards became the head of Columbia University's First Medical Division at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1947 he was promoted to Lambert Professor of Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He held both positions until his retirement in 1961.
After his retirement from active teaching, Richards continued to lecture and to publish, particularly with regard to his personal and professional interests in the English physician and anatomist William Harvey (1578 - 1657) and the classical Greek physician and philosopher Hippocrates.
In testimony to the Joint Legislative Committee on Narcotics in 1957, Richards, as a member of the committee on drug addiction of the New York Academy of Medicine, recommended that hospital clinics should be able to distribute drugs to addicts. He also charged that Bellevue Hospital was woefully neglected by the city of New York. These charges were denied by the city and the commissioner of hospitals but were supported by the interns and resident physicians. Richards also urged a wider range of health services and benefits for the elderly.
He died of a heart attack at his home in Lakeville, Connecticut
He contributed to and coedited with Alfred P. Fishman the highly regarded book Circulation of the Blood: Men and Ideas, which was published in 1964 and reprinted in 1982. He also published Medical Priesthoods and Other Essays, which includes some of his writings on Hippocrates, in 1970. In 1956, Dickinson Richards, André Cournand, and Werner Forssmann were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their "discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system. "
His concerns for the proper objectives of a medical education are well expressed in the Billings Lecture, which Richards delivered at the June 1963 meeting of the American Medical Association. This lecture shows his concern for the environment, the control of diseases, and the compelling need for a humanistic approach to the practice of medicine.
Although described as shy and modest by Cournand, Richards spoke out on a number of public health issues, at times taking a different position from that of the American Medical Association.
On September 19, 1931, he married Constance Burrell Riley, a Wellesley College graduate who was a research technician in his laboratory. They had four children.
