The first line reads: She sits on the bed with a helpless expression. What is your name? Auguste. Last name? Auguste. What is your husband’s name? Auguste, I think. The 32 pages of medical records that follow are the oldest medical description of Alzheimer’s disease. Psychiatrist Konrad Maurer and his colleagues at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt found the file in their hospital’s archive, where it had been missing for nearly 90 years, and published excerpts from it last May in The Lancet. The notes, in a cramped, archaic German script, were written by Alois Alzheimer—the physician who first described the disease.
His patient, Auguste D., was a 51-year-old woman who had suffered fits of paranoid jealousy and memory lapses so disturbing that her family finally brought her to a local hospital known as the Castle of the Insane. Over the next four years Alzheimer tracked her condition. Upon ...
