Vol 5 n° 1 - Dementia
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he 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists (37 Versammlung Südwestdeutscher Irrenärzte) was held in Tübingen on November 3, 1906.At the meeting,Alois Alzheimer (Figure 1), who was a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the Munich University Hospital and a coworker of Emil Kraepelin, reported on an unusual case study involving a “peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex” (Über einen eigenartigen, schweren Erkrankungsprozeß der Hirnrinde). Prelude Alzheimer described the long-term study of the female patient Auguste D., whom he had observed and investi- gated at the Frankfurt Psychiatric Hospital in November 1901, when he was a senior assistant there.Alzheimer had been interested in the symptomatology, progression, and course of the illness of Auguste D. from the time of her admission, and he documented the development of her unusual disease very precisely from the beginning. In March 1901, the husband of the 50-year-old woman had noticed an untreatable paranoid symptomatology in his wife and then—in fast progression and with increasing intensity—sleep disorders, disturbances of memory, aggres- siveness, crying, and progressive confusion. Eventually, the husband was forced to take his wife to the Community Psychiatric Hospital at Frankfurt am Main.The sympto- matology increasingly deteriorated and so Auguste D. remained an inpatient of the hospital up to her death on April 8, 1906. After the autopsy, Alzheimer was able to investigate the brain of Auguste D. both morphologically and histologically.These results and their relationship with the clinical findings recorded over more than 4 years were the basis for Alzheimer’s lecture at the Tübingen meeting. The chairman of the session was the very prominent psy- chiatrist from the University of Freiburg, Alfred Hoche C l i n i c a l   r e s e a r c h 1 0 1 The discovery of Alzheimer’s disease Hanns Hippius, MD; Gabriele Neundörfer, MD Keywords:  Alois  Alzheimer;  German  psychiatry;  Alzheimer’s  disease;  case  of Auguste D.; case of Josef F.; history Author affiliations: Psychiatrische Klinik der LMU, Munich, Germany Address for correspondence: Prof Hanns Hippius, Psychiatrische Klinik der LMU, Nußbaumstraße 7, 80336 Munich, Germany
(e-mail: karin.koelbert@psy.med.uni-muenchen.de) T On November 3, 1906, a clinical psychiatrist and neuro- anatomist, Alois Alzheimer, reported “A peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex”to the 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tübingen. He described a 50-year-old woman whom he had fol- lowed from her admission for paranoia, progressive sleep and memory disturbance, aggression, and confusion, until her  death  5  years  later.  His  report  noted  distinctive plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain histology. It excited little interest despite an enthusiastic response from Kraepelin, who promptly included “Alzheimer’s dis- ease” in the 8th edition of his text Psychiatrie in 1910. Alzheimer published three further cases in 1909 and a “plaque-only” variant in 1911, which reexamination of the original specimens in 1998 showed to be a different stage of the same process. Alzheimer died in 1915, aged 51, soon after gaining the chair of psychiatry in Breslau, and long before his name became a household word. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2003;5:101-108.