© heiner fangerau, thorsten halling and nils hansson, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/97890044064��_007 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc-nd 4.0 License.

The surgeon and urologist Werner Forßmann (1904-1979) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1956. At the time of the prize ceremony, several newspapers portrayed Forssmann as an unknown rural physician who suddenly had become an international star. Drawing on nominations and reports in the Nobel Prize Archive for Physiology or Medicine in Stockholm as well as correspondence from the private archive of the Forßmann family, this paper reconstructs why the Nobel Committee chose to award Forßmann. We show that Forssmann's work was appreciated in medical textbooks and that he enjoyed a relatively sound reputation in the international scientific community even before he became a Nobel Prize laureate. At a more general level, we use his example to explore some mechanisms of scientific recognition.

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ZusammenfassungDer Leipziger Arzt Hermann Rohleder wurde bereits von seinen Zeitgenossen als Pionier der Sexualmedizin angesehen. Sein Werdegang führte ihn von der Behandlung von Geschlechtskrankheiten über die Urologie zur medizinischen Sexualwissenschaft. Er setzte sich für die Institutionalisierung der Sexualwissenschaft ein, seine Versuche der Etablierung einer Professur an der Universität Leipzig scheiterten jedoch mehrfach. Das Leben und Wirken Rohleders zeigen, wie eng die Disziplinenentwicklung der Urologie und Sexualwissenschaft zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts verknüpft waren.

The study shows that Swedish urologists and surgeons generally did not switch to English during the years immediately after the First World War, as has been documented in other countries. After a decrease during the first 10 years after the First World War, the German language dominated among Swedish urologists and surgeons from the 1930s until the early 1940s, when English first dominated at large. The rapidity of this process shows that almost all surgical researchers had changed from German to English within just a few years.

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The middle of the 19th century marks the beginning of a global process of science and knowledge transfer from ­Europe to the rest of the world. During the phase of globali­zation, Austrian physician and ethnographer Jacob E. Polak (1818–1891) played a key role in the transmission of practical and scientific reasoning, leading to the development of medical science and clinical care in Persia. In 1851, Polak was commissioned by the Persian court to work as an academic teacher at the first secular institution of higher learning in Teheran, the Dār al-Fonūn. After 4 years of teaching and working as a doctor and surgeon, Polak was appointed personal physician to the Qājār king, Nāṣer-ad-Dīn Shāh (r. 1848–1896). During Polak’s 9 year stay in Persia, he performed numerous surgical operations with specific focus on lithotomies on men and women of all ages. He documented each operation and collected samples of bladder calculi for the purpose of chemical analysis. After his return to Austria, he published a detailed report on his practice of lithotomy in Persia. This extensive documentation is, we believe, the only known historical evidence that currently exists of the introduction of modern urology to Persia. This study will present Polak’s role as a pioneer of modern medicine and lithotomy, and will examine how he introduced the latest achievements of Viennese medicine in the field of operative urology to Persia.

Purpose To date, 11 scientists have received the Nobel Prize for discoveries directly related to cancer research. This article provides an overview of cancer researchers nominated for the Nobel Prize from 1901 to 1960 with a focus on Ernst von Leyden (1832–1910), the founder of this journal, and Karl Heinrich Bauer (1890–1978). Methods We collected nominations and evaluations in the archive of the Nobel committee of physiology or medicine in Sweden to identify research trends and to analyse oncology in a Nobel Prize context. Results We found a total of 54 nominations citing work on cancer as motivation for 11 candidates based in Germany from 1901 to 1953. In the 1930s, the US became the leading nation of cancer research in a Nobel context with nominees like Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) and George N. Papanicolaou (1883–1962). Discussion The will of Alfred Nobel stipulates that Nobel laureates should have “conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”. Why were then so few cancer researchers recognized with the Nobel medal from 1901 to 1960? Our analysis of the Nobel dossiers points at multiple reasons: (1) Many of the proposed cancer researchers were surgeons, and surgery has a weak track record in a Nobel context; (2) several scholars were put forward for clinical work and not for basic research (historically, the Nobel committee has favoured basic researchers); (3) the scientists were usually not nominated for a single discovery, but rather for a wide range of different achievements.