The whole world speaks of Alzheimer’s, the incurable disease that afflicts so many older people. The very name Alzheimer is sure to bring a shudder. Thirty to forty million people are now afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disorder that strips its victims of their identity and leaves family bereft and social services strained. Yet Alois Alzheimer, after whom the disease is named, remains largely unknown.
Alzheimer was an obsessed doctor and scientist. By day he calmly examined his patients and cared for them tenderly: deep into the night he sat at his microscope and studied slides of the brain that he had prepared himself. His contemporaries called him “the psychiatrist with the microscope” because he was convinced that mental illnesses were disease of the brain, in stark contrast to the then-burgeoning approach of psychoanalysis, which traced psychological problems to traumatic childhood experiences. An unavoidable clash between the two sides took place at a conference in 1906. Alzheimer stood there as his contribution on the case of Auguste D. met with no interest; the minutes of the proceedings called it “in-appropriate for a brief report”.
Yet just a few years later presenile dementia, from which only a few people suffered at that time, began to receive increased attention. Senile dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease, quickly emerged as one of the most frequently used disease names in the history of medicine. However, Alois Alzheimer did not live to see these events: He died in 1915 at age 51.
Fifty years later, life expectancy in the industrialized world had doubled. Alzheimer’s disease claimed its first prominent victims: The world was shaken when actress Rita Hayworth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Hope continued that it would remain, as Alzheimer himself described it, a “peculiar disease.” But when Ronald Reagan bid farewell to his compatriots in a 1994 letter stating that he had Alzheimer's people around the world finally became aware of the seriousness of the disease. Today, 30 to 40 million people are afflicted with this illness worldwide.
In private life Alois Alzheimer was a loving, imaginative, and often lively man who never forgot his roots in the German region of Franconian Spessart. Deep insight into his life and works was made possible only through many personal conversations with his descendants and by means of a family tree produced for this book.
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