Richards, Dickinson Woodruff (1895-1973), was an American physician who refined the technique of cardiac catheterization, an important diagnostic procedure. Cardiac catheterization involves threading a long, flexible tube through a large blood vessel in an arm or leg to the heart. The procedure enables doctors to detect and treat many diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Richards shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with two other scientists who helped develop the technique, Andre F. Cournand of France and the United States and Werner Forssman of Germany.
Richards was born in Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Yale University in 1917 and served with the United States Army in 1917 and 1918, during World War I. After the war, he studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He received an M.A. degree in physiology (the study of bodily functions) in 1922 and an M.D. in 1923, both from Columbia, and began to practice medicine. He also taught physiology at Columbia from 1928 to 1961, becoming a professor of medicine there in 1947.
Richards and Cournand began to work together at Bellevue Hospital in New York City in 1931. The two doctors began their research on catheterization in 1936, working first on animals and then on human patients to perfect their equipment and methods.
