In addition to collecting Showalter Dairy Collectibles, I am fascinated with Ancestry.com and my family history.  In a search about two years ago, I came across a man named Philip Showalter Hench.  I wasn’t sure how he was related to me.  I then came across a newspaper article at my mother’s house that said the Hench was indeed related to me–a cousin of my great-grandfather Frank Showalter.

Hench was a scientist and medical pioneer.  He worked at the Mayo Clinic and was one of the scientists who developed cortisone.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1950 for “discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects.”

These two medals were produced in Portugal shortly after the Nobel Prize was awarded.  One is silver and the other bronze.  Hench was born in 1896 in Pittsburgh, PA and unfortunately passed while on vacation in Jamaica in 1965.