On November 26th 1901, Alois Alzheimer, an assistant physician at the psychiatric institution in Frankfurt, met his now-famous patient, Auguste D., for the first time. Soon into their first conversation, he realized that the 51 year old woman showed symptoms unlike any he had seen before. When Alzheimer asked her questions, her replies didn't match. She also often stopped mid-sentence, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say. She was confused and anxious. Alzheimer was intrigued, but it wasn't until nearly five years later that he got a first glimpse into the underlying pathology.
When Auguste D. died on April 8th 1906, Alzheimer, then head of the anatomy laboratory at the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich, received her brain for histological analysis, and made drawings of what he saw. Right away, he realized that this case also differed anatomically from all known brain pathologies. Throughout the brain, ...
