History
Histories The physicians and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome linked growing dementia to getting older. Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist, first identified the first case of Alzheimer's disease in a fifty-year-old woman he dubbed Auguste D. He followed her case until she died in 1906, when he made his first public report on it. In the medical literature over the next five years, eleven cases that were similar to this one were reported, some of which had already been referred to as Alzheimer's disease. After suppressing some of Auguste D's clinical (delusions and hallucinations) and pathological (arteriosclerotic changes) features, Emil Kraepelin first described the condition as distinct. He included Alzheimer's disease, which Kraepelin also referred to as presenile dementia, as a subtype of senile dementia in the eighth edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry, which was published on July 15, 1910.
