[Medicine and literature: "Nobel Prize. No jokes please!" : Gottfried Benn and his nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature]

[Early origins of a physician specializing in sexual medicine from the urological perspective : Max Marcuse (1877-1963)-"physician for skin and urinary diseases"]

The development of sexual medicine starts in Europe in parallel to the evolving clinical specialties urology, venerology, gynecology, neurology/psychiatry, and internal medicine at the end of the 19th century in Berlin. For this reason, we find many examples of fruitful collaboration but also in segregation from each other in defining the new specialties. Max Marcuse, the only one of the well-known Berlin specialists Ivan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Albert Moll to survive the Holocaust, was able to publish articles in Palestine and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s. This year is the 60th anniversary of his death.

The enactment of physician-authors in Nobel Prize nominations

Several physicians have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, but so far none of them have received it. Because physicians as women and men of letters have been a major topic of feuilletons, seminars and books for many years, questions arise to what extent medicine was a topic in the proposals for the Nobel Prize and in the Nobel jury evaluations: how were the nominees enacted (or not) as physicians, and why were none of them awarded? Drawing on nomination letters and evaluations by the Nobel committee for literature collected in the archive of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, this article offers a first overview of nominated physician-author candidates. The focus is on the Austrian historian of medicine Max Neuburger (1868-1955), the German novelist Hans Carossa (1878-1956), and the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), but it also briefly takes further physician-author nominees into account such as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). The article is part of an interdisciplinary medical humanities project that analyses nominations and committee reports for physicians and natural scientists nominated for the Nobel Prize from 1901 to 1970.

[History of epidemics in urology in German-speaking countries]

Pandemics are relevant for many fields of medicine from microbiology to economics and epidemiology. Many medical specialties which developed during the 19th century, e. g., urology, have had much impact on diagnostics and therapy, such as during the treatment of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. For some of them, including urology, treatment of, for example, sexually transmitted diseases, was constitutional and differed between countries.