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 at Howard, medical students attended lectures at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a federally funded psychiatric hospital for mental patients. Dr. Benjamin Karpman, a psychoanalyst and forensic psychiatrist, was a member of the hospital staff, and a professor of psychiatry at Howard. Prudhomme attended his classes and wrote his senior paper on suicide which was published in 1938 in the journal, "The Psychoanalytic Review". Prudhomme planned to do a psychiatric residency at St. Elizabeth's but he was told that federal legislation, which established the hospital in 1855, enforced segregation. In 1937, he obtained a fellowship at the University of Chicago but was