PSYCHIATRY AND THE NOBEL PRIZE: EMIL KRAEPELIN’S NOBELIBILITY

Abstract

1. Introduction In 1910, Kraepelin was invited to nominate a scholar for the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He replied to the Nobel Committee: After receiving the invitation, I contacted colleagues in other medical fields for advice, because as it seems, researcher in my field can possibly for such an honourable award (Nobel archive (NA), Kraepelin yearbook 1910). It is speculative whether Kraepelin implied that no other researcher in my field but me should resonate in the mind of the readers, but his reply reveals three aspects of medicine and science associated with questions of personal achievements and reputation which will be investigated further in this paper. First, the staging of excellence in medicine with the help of the Nobel Prize; second, the role of psychiatry in the cast of the medical disciplines; and third, Kraepelin's story as a Nobel Prize runner-up. Given the focus of this journal, we will not discuss the prize-worthiness of Kraepelin's scientific work or his legacy in detail. It is in this context sufficient to mention that Kraepelin's name still stands for excellence in psychiatry: Established in 1928, the Golden Kraepelin Medal (awarded by the German Research Institute of Psychiatry) is one of the world's most renowned awards in psychiatry. Reflecting upon this reputation, it is perhaps not surprising that Kraepelin was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. In this paper we demonstrate the ambivalence of excellence and failure preserved in the Nobel Prize archive by tracing the nominations for Kraepelin, one of the founders of modern scientific psychiatry. A few of the arguments presented here were also highlighted in a recent correspondence piece for World Psychiatry (Hansson and Fangerau 2016). Taking Kraepelin's case as an example, we try to deconstruct the aura surrounding the Nobel Prize, arguably--at least nowadays--the strongest symbol of scientific excellence worldwide. The key questions concern how and why particular scientists have been acknowledged as the greatest in their respective fields. We do that by analyzing Nobel Prize nominations collected in the archive of the Nobel Committee for physiology or medicine in Sweden. These files offer new perspectives on reward mechanisms in medicine and on how excellence has been attributed within particular scientific communities during the 20th century. Moreover, the nominations can help to reconstruct networks in medicine and science, and even more so if--where applicable--personal letters between nominator and nominee and comments in the daily press are added to the analysis. Bo S. Lindberg, for example, combined such sources and presented new nuances in terms of international reputation of the strong Nobel Prize candidate and renowned Swedish neurologist Salomon Henschen during the first decades of the 20th century (Lindberg 2013). Following this approach, we are interested in why some often nominated candidates fail in the end. To understand Kraepelin's Nobel Prize candidacy--or Nobelibility, Juri Allik coined this neologism at the Tartu conference Emil Kraepelin 160/30 in February 2016, meaning the eligibility for winning a Nobel Prize--better, we will first have a brief look at the Nobel Prize nomination procedure and zoom in on the rather few prizes for psychiatrists. Second, the nominations for Kraepelin will be reconstructed in order to understand why he as one of the most important psychiatrist of his time was never awarded the prize. In the end, Kraepelin could not, to use his own words: compete for such an honourable award. Thus, we finally have to ask, why he was only a second best option for the Nobel Prize committee. The focus will be on Kraepelin as a nominee, although he also acted as a nominator himself on several occasions. From 1901 to 1921 he nominated in chronological order, according to the official Nobel Prize nomination database, scholars of different nationalities working in various fields of medicine: Robert Koch (1901, 1905), Jules Bordet (1910, 1912, 1914), Bernhard Naunyn (1910), Felix Marchand (1911, 1912), Franz Nissl (1919), and August von Wassermann (1920, 1921) (https://www. …