Alois Alzheimer
Alzheimer, Alois (1864-1915) was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist who in 1907 first described a brain disease that later was named for him.
Alzheimer disease is a degenerative brain disease that affects memory, thinking, behavior, and emotion. It is the most common cause of severe memory loss in elderly adults. The disease attacks few people before age 60, but occurs in about 20 percent of people who live to age 85. It is not linked with social class, gender, ethnic group, or geographical location.
Alzheimer was born in 1864 in Markbreit, Germany. He attended the universities of Aschaffen-burg, Berlin, Tübingen, and Würzburg, where he received his medical degree in 1887. While working at the state asylum in Frankfurt am Main, he became interested in research on the cortex of the human brain. Alzheimer became research assistant to Emil Kraepelin at the Munich medical school, where he created a new laboratory for brain research. Alzheimer became director of the anatomical laboratories of Kraepelin's psychiatric clinic in Munich. In 1912, Alzheimer became professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland).
Alzheimer's interest in histopathology, the study of tissue changes in disease, made him a giant in this area. With Franz Nissl, he showed physical causes of mental illness. Alzheimer published many papers on conditions and diseases of the brain, including one on cerebral arteriosclerosis in 1904 and on Huntington's chorea in 1911.
In 1907, Alzheimer gave a lecture in which he identified an “unusual disease of the cerebral cortex” that affected a woman in her 50's, causing memory loss, disorientation, hallucinations, and, ultimately, her death at age 55. In 1907, Alzheimer gave a full clinical and pathological description of this disease, called presenile dementia. Kraepelin named it Alzheimer disease.
In 1913, he became chair of the department of psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Breslau.