The first recorded example of Alzheimer’s disease involved Auguste Deter, a woman who died in Frankfurt, Germany, in April 1906, after experiencing memory loss and great anguish.

In physician Alois Alzheimer’s 1907 paper1 describing Deter’s symptoms, he wrote that she “is completely delirious, drags around her bedding, calls her husband and daughter and seems to suffer from auditory hallucinations. Often she screamed for many hours”. Alzheimer examined her brain under a microscope after her death, and described what are now considered the hallmarks of the disease: deposits of the protein amyloid-β, known as plaques, and dense fibrils of the protein tau, now called neurofibrillary tangles. Deter died in a psychiatric institution, curled up in the fetal position, of sepsis caused by bedsores.

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