Alois Alzheimer was born on June 14, 1864, in Marcbraite. From there, the Alzheimer's family moved to the Royal Humanist Gymnasium. Later, having chosen medicine as his path, the young Alois was a university student at medical universities in Aschaffenburg, Tuebingen, Berlin, and Würzburg (where he wrote his doctoral thesis and received his degree in 1887).
His medical career began in 1888 as a resident physician at the Hospital for the Mentally ill and Epileptics in Frankfurt am Main. There he worked for seven years and was later appointed head physician. Alzheimer continued his career as a senior physician assistant at Municipal Hospital for Lunatics and Epileptics.
Even while working, Alois continued to study his main specialty, psychiatry, but his attention was also drawn to the field of neuropathology. He began to take an interest in the study of the human cortex and its anatomy. During his work, he collected a large archive of autopsy data, which he used throughout his research career. After Alzheimer's year at the Emile Szoli Hospital, Franz Nissl joined him.
He was already known for his revolutionary nerve cell staining technique, which is still used in neurobiological laboratories around the world. The two scientists became close friends, spending days working with patients and discussing the results in the evenings. Together, the researchers studied the pathological and normal anatomy of the cerebral cortex. As a result, their work resulted in a large collection of works, consisting of six books, which was called "Histological and histopathological study of the cerebral cortex" and was published between 1906 and 1918. In 1894, Alois Alzheimer married the widow of a banker Cecilia Heisenheimer at the age of 30, from whom he had three children. Unfortunately, their happiness was not long, in 1901 Cecilia died.
Fatal meeting
In 1895 Nissl moved to Heidelberg to work with the German psychiatrist Emil Wilhelm Magnus Georg Kraepelin. At the same time, Alois becomes director of the city hospital in Frankfurt. It was there that the fateful meeting was waiting for him, thanks to which modern scientists from many laboratories around the world are puzzling their heads to solve the mystery of the disease, named after him.
So whose case did the scientist describe? The first such patient, or rather a patient, was the 51-year old Augustine Deter, who was hospitalized by her husband because of the deteriorating mental health of the woman. She had not quite a classic set of symptoms: disorientation, persecution, memory loss, insomnia, and difficulty reading and writing. This is what the researcher was interested in. Similar signs of intellectual weakening have been observed before, but described in people of much older age. The symptoms continued to progress to hallucinations and extreme aggression. After the death of the patient, Alzheimer decided to study her corpse. The autopsy confirmed what the doctor suspected, namely the presence of a disease that affected the brain tissue. As a result, this woman was the earliest case of the disease description.
The second case of dementia, which was studied by the scientist, was the disease of 56-year-old man Johann F. He was placed in a university psychiatric hospital in September 1907, and he died three years later. An autopsy of his brain showed changes similar to the first case. As a result, Kraepelin called the syndrome "Alzheimer's disease" in a chapter of his book.
to be continued in the next part