Alzheimer research forum report: Tübingen: the man behind the eponym.

16 November 2006. Everyone with even a passing interest in Alzheimer disease has seen a sepia-toned photograph of its namesake like the one on last week’s cover of Science magazine. A fatherly, pensive man with a mustache, sometimes a cigar, photographed from his right side and often with hands folded in his lap as was customary for sitting portraits at the time. But there is much more to Alois Alzheimer,and participants at the Alzheimer 100 Centennial conference, held 3–6 November in Tübingen (where Alzheimer studied for a semester), were treated to a glimpse or two. Conference co-organizer Konrad Maurer directs the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where Alzheimer worked when he met his patient Auguste Deter. Maurer and his wife Ulrike are a fountain of knowledge about the man, his work, and his time. They took conventioneers on a tour to the house in the Bavarian town of Marktbreit at the river Main, where Alzheimer was born on 14 June 1864 as one of eight children to a notary at the royal regional court. (When Alzheimer’s older brother Karl was born, Karl’s mother died. Alzheimer’s father waited the year that social custom required before he married her twin sister. Karl and Alois indeed look so alike that on some photographs it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart, were it not for a scar on the left cheek that Alois sustained during a fencing duel in his student fraternity.) Ulrike Maurer restored Alois’ birth house as a museum in the style of Alzheimer’s time. The notes below are taken from the tour and from Alois Alzheimer, His Life and Work with Text and Photographs [1]. Alzheimer disease has become one of the most widely known eponyms for any human illness. One might think that the man behind it focused on it exclusively throughout his career. But that’s far from true. Alzheimer worked on an astonishing range of diseases of the mind, and published equally widely. He was deeply tied into clinical service at his successive places of work in the cities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Munich, and Breslau; part of his distinction lies in the fact that, in addition to his load as a hands-on physician and administrator, he studied everything that caught his interest. A dissertation, completed in Wuerzburg, on the topic of ceruminal glands (better known as the source of earwax), got him started in histology and microscopy, but the topic could not hold his curiosity. His first position as assistant physician brought him to the Lunatic Asylum of Frankfurt, an institution directed years earlier by Heinrich Hoffman, the author of the children’s book Struwwelpeter. In the grandiose, fairy-tale building that housed the asylum, Alzheimer worked under Emil Sioli, who would later ship Auguste D.’s brain to Alzheimer in Munich, and with Franz Nissl, who became a close collaborator and friend. Alzheimer and Nissl studied autopsy tissue of hundreds of different psychiatric cases. Even then, they both believed that mental diseases are brain diseases, and that organic, that is, anatomic/pathologic correlates could be found that would allow a much more specific classification than existed at the time. Alzheimer also was convinced that the symptoms he saw in his patients represented a far greater number of distinct mental illnesses than the current categories suggested. His time in Frankfurt, from 1888 to 1903, was prolific. He published 23 papers, on topics ranging from arteriosclerotic atrophy of the brain (Alzheimer believed that arteriosclerosis caused what is now considered the late-