ABSTRACT
In 1907 Aloïs Alzheimer, a neurologist in Frankfurt-on-Main, described a disease which was characterized by slowly advancing dementia accompanied by serious behavioral disturbances. The end of the disease was marked by the total mental and physical deterioration of the patient, who lay motionless in bed like a fetus in the womb, with legs and knees pulled up. When the first symptoms of dementia occurred, the patient was barely fifty. Five years later she died in an institution. From the post mortem it appeared that the patients brain had shrunk considerably. When the brain tissue was studied under the microscope, it could be seen that there had been a considerable loss of brain cells, especially in the cerebral cortex, the outermost part of the brain, also called grey matter.
