Nobel Prize Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays. The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize. In the last decades of the 19th century, many chemists had made significant contributions. Thus, with the Chemistry Prize, the Academy "was chiefly faced with merely deciding the order in which these scientists should be awarded the prize". The Academy received 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff. Van 't Hoff was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics. The Swedish Academy chose the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature.
Charles Prudhomme dismayed to learn that he was assigned to work at the Provident Hospital, which provided medical care to black people. He returned to Washington, DC to work at St. Elizabeth's, but he was unsuccessful. In 1940, using his contacts with then U.S. Senator Harry Truman, arrangements were made for Prudhomme to go to Tuskegee, Alabama, and work at the Veterans Administration hospital for black veterans. He met many black psychiatrists who had been trained in Boston by Solomon Carter Fuller (1872-1953), the first American black psychiatrist. Prudhomme remained at Tuskegee until 1943 when the U.S. Army transferred him to Howard