In 1901, when Dr. Alois Alzheimer started talking to his 50-year-old patient Auguste Deter, he immediately realized that there was something wrong with her. Her responses to his questions were not only repetitive and wrong, but she quickly forgot them. Sadly, she seemed to be aware of her helplessness.
He decided to place her on an isolation room but she would later start showing clear symptoms of dementia: loss of memory, delusions, sleeping problems, and would even scream for hours in the middle of the night. He called her disease the "Disease of Forgetfulness." Alzheimer's is a progressive, degenerative disorder in which the cells in the brain become damaged, causing the symptoms described above.
In 1902, Alzheimer left the "Irrenschloss" (Castle of the Insane) as the institution was informally known and moved from Frankfurt to Munich. However, he made frequent calls to Frankfurt to learn the health status of his former patient. On April 9, 1906, he was told that Deter had died. He requested that her medical records and brain be immediately sent to him.
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