Cortisone

“The anti-inflammatory properties which quickly made cortisone the archetypical post-war miracle drug had been discovered through Hench’s [Kendall’s rheumatologist colleague who shared the 1950 Nobel price with Kendall and Reichstein] clinical intuition, and the fact that such applications [had] not been anticipated by endocrinologists studying Compound E [pre-1947 name of cortisone] in animal models certainly demonstrates the limits of laboratory-based drug development research. Intriguingly, however, the use of 1930s-style whole cortical extracts to boost strength and to combat mental stress and fatigue, the prewar market for the remedy which must have shaped pharmaceutical companies’ expectations of the indications drugs like cortisone would acquire, continued into the 1970s, due mainly to a medical movement promoting the extracts as a cure for hypoglycemia” (Rasmussen III, 321). First injection of cortisone given on 21 September 1948 at Mayo Clinic by Charles Slocumb & Philip Hench, whose biochemist colleague Edward Kendall first isolated “Compound E (cortisone) in 1936 (Hetenyi & Karsh, 426).