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Abstract
When Thorn moved to Johns Hopkins University in 1936, doctors still had only crude animal adrenal extracts with which to treat the adrenal gland disorder Addison's disease. Some of the patients who received these treatments "just felt awful", Cahill told The Lancet. In the late 1930s, desoxycorticosterone was first synthesised by several laboratories. Thorn showed that subcutaneous pellets of the corticosteroid could be used to correct adrenal insufficiency in dogs, and eventually in people. Thorn also reported on the effects of cortisol (17-hydroxycorticosterone) and related corticosteroids on the adrenals, which was critical to having cortisol adopted as a mainstay of Addison's treatment. This work was only possible because Thorn, 10 years earlier, when working as a doctor at a summer camp, had treated Edward Kendall. Kendall, who would win the 1950 Nobel Prize for his work on adrenal hormones, sent Thorn the synthetic glucocorticoids he had been working on.