The enactment of physician-authors in Nobel Prize nominations

Abstract

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.