What Really Causes Alzheimer's Disease - Soil and Health Library

IN THE BEGINNING: A HISTORY 2
I am going to tell the story of my life
in an alphabet of ashes.
Blas De Otero, Twenty Poems
In 1998, Neurogenetics 1 reported that Manuel Graeber and his
colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in
Martinsried, near Munich, had discovered over 250 slides made
from samples of the brain of Auguste D. These slides had been
housed for almost a century in a basement of the University of
Munich. This find was big news. Researchers had been looking
for Auguste D.’s brain samples since 1996, when her original
hospital file had turned up at an institute of the University
of Frankfurt. 2 Why was the discovery of tissue slides from a
patient who died in 1906 so significant to Science?
THE FIRST CASE
Auguste D. was first admitted to Frankfurt’s Hospital for the
Mentally Ill and Epileptics in 1901. Even though she was only
51, Auguste D. was severely divorced from reality, suffering
from disorientation, hallucinations, and paranoia. 3 Her speech
also was extremely limited. One of her physicians in Frankfurt,
Dr. Alois Alzheimer, had been a doctor at the hospital for
some 13 years but was still baffled by her case and so took an
unusual interest in it. Even after a career move to the Royal
Psychiatric Clinic in Munich in 1903, Alzheimer continued to
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