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Tadeusz Reichstein was born in Wloclawek (Poland) into a Polish-Jewish family. His family emigrated to Switzerland, and he was educated in the Technical University of Zurich, becoming an engineer of chemistry. Thus he started his scientific career, firstly in Zurich and later in Basel. In his very busy life, he developed a method of vitamin C synthesis enabling industrial production of this important compound. Later, Reichstein isolated and synthesized such important adrenocortical hormones as cortisone, desoxycorticosterone and aldosterone. He received several awards but the most important was a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1950). Reichstein spent the last years of his life in his own botanical garden and laboratory working on fern cytogenetics and the relations between different species of this archaic plant. Despite extraordinary and still valuable scientific achievements, he was always a very modest man with a humanistic attitude.

The paper describes the impact of mineralocorticoid substances on water regulation from Theophrastus (IV century B.C.) to Thomas Addison (1849). It also opens to the missed discovery of aldosterone of I.A. Macchi.