[The Alken stages-a German-French affair]

Anatomy and pathophysiology of the prostate have gained increasing attention of anatomists and surgeons at the beginning of the 19th century. It was only around 1900 that French and German authors discussed staging of clinical benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) in order to group therapy. From 1970 to the 1990s, staging of the clinical course of BPH was associated with the name of Carl-Erich Alken, a leading figure within the German urological society at that time, although Alken never researched or focused on disease staging. He only presented the three traditional clinical stages originally described in 1888 by Jean Casimir Felix Guyon in a short and often edited and translated student's textbook (1955).