On November 3, 1906, German shrinks flocked to the picturesque town of Tübingen for the 37th Assembly of Southwest German Psychiatrists. It was here that Alois Alzheimer first presented game-changing research on the disease that today bears his name, but his presentation was met with crickets. With no follow-up questions, Alzheimer was hurried off-stage.

You might be wondering why an audience of esteemed psychiatrists would be so underwhelmed by a presentation on one of the century’s most significant medical discoveries. The reason? Attendees were on the edge of their seats awaiting the next speaker, who promised unmissable research on compulsive masturbation.

Okay, that wasn’t the only reason, but it was a factor nonetheless.

First, a little context. Psychiatrists in the early 1900s were so obsessed with the horniest corners of the human mind that they created an entire field of sexology. The earliest sexology journal was established in 1908, but its origins stretch back further, and German psychiatrists were some of the top dogs in this nascent field. Richard von Krafft-Ebing dropped a land mine in societal understandings of sexuality with his 1886 magnum opus Psychopathia Sexualis, a juicy compendium of so-called perversion. In their quest to understand lust, German psychiatrists gripped their colleagues with lascivious tales of same-sex desire and, of course, frenzied self-pleasure.

It’s no wonder poor Alzheimer couldn’t compete. His research centered the dying years of Auguste Deter, whose brain Alzheimer studied after her death in 1906. Deter had been admitted to an asylum in 1901; after nearly three decades of a seemingly happy marriage, her personality changed drastically in an alarmingly short space of time. Deter experienced progressive memory loss, and she would lash out at her husband in fits of rage and jealousy.

Alzheimer’s presentation had been years in the making, yet a biography of Alzheimer notes that members of the conference’s scientific committee branded his research as “inappropriate for a brief presentation.” As we now know, Alzheimer had the last laugh. In the following four years, he published several other case studies and consolidated his landmark research.

But what about the show-stealing compulsive masturbation psychiatrist? Unfortunately, in the few surviving accounts of the 1906 conference, there’s no other information given about this wanking-obsessed shrink. What we do know is that Alzheimer’s snub was pretty embarrassing — apparently, the chairman of the following session awkwardly said, “So then, respected colleague Alzheimer, I thank you for your remarks, clearly there is no desire for discussion.”

The press relegated Alzheimer to a mere conference footnote too, but his determination eventually won out, and Alzheimer’s disease was officially recognized in 1910. Still, our obsession with gooning nearly robbed us of one of history’s most important medical breakthroughs.