“He Gave Us the Cornerstone of Sexual Medicine”: A Nobel Plan but No Nobel Prize for Eugen Steinach

This paper reviews the files in the archive of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine on the Austrian physiologist and pioneering researcher in the emerging fields of urology and sexual medicine: Eugen Steinach (1861–1944). It reconstructs and analyzes why and by whom Steinach was nominated for the Nobel Prize between 1920 and 1938 and discusses the reasons why he never received the award, although the Nobel Committee judged him as prizeworthy. Steinach’s Nobel nominee career is extraordinary – not only because of his strong support by renowned international nominators from different scientific and medical disciplines, but also because of the controversial discussions within the Nobel Committee on his achievements, colored by the debates in the international scientific community. The Nobel Prize story adds a new perspective on how contemporary international scholars evaluated Steinach’s research on reproduction, “male-making” females, “female-making” males, homosexuality, and the concept of rejuvenation.