Auguste Deter had just turned fifty when she started feeling jealous of her husband. That was the first symptom. It was followed by increasing memory loss, until one day she left her house and didn’t know how to return. When she started shouting that they wanted to kill her, she was admitted to the Psychiatric Hospital of Frankfurt. Dr. Alois Alzheimer followed her for months and realized that he was facing a strange case. Auguste wasn’t crazy, he was sure of that. When Auguste passed away and Alois was able to analyze her brain, the autopsy revealed that her brain was atrophied and, under the microscope, showed rare lesions he had never seen before.
On November 4, 1906, Dr. Alzheimer presented his findings in a conference and soon after published them in an article titled “On a Peculiar Disease of the Cerebral Cortex,” which went almost unnoticed by the scientific community.
This is the starting point of this dramatized conference, which revolves around the figure of Dr. Alzheimer and the discovery of the disease that bears his name. It’s a journey through time, in which we explore the most relevant findings about the disease, from its discovery to the present day.
