As a historian of Alzheimer’s disease, I want to call attention to one important error in the article (“The case of Auguste D,” Tempo, July 22) about Frau Augusta D, Alois Alzheimer’s patient and the case source of a new disease category. This error reminds us how easy it is to distort what happened in the past in the light of present knowledge.
Alzheimer’s case, reported in 1906 to the Northern German Society of Alientists, did not dispel the notion that the “death of memory and personality were a natural accompaniment of aging.” The changes in Frau August’s brain resembled those in many older patients; she, however, was only 51 and so, in the view that dominated for nearly 70 more years, she could not have the condition popularly called senility.
This now-famous case helped forge a diagnostic distinction between Alzheimer’s disease or “presenile dementia” and “senile dementia” or “organic brain syndrome,” a split that lasted for much of this century and impeded research into and care of older people with symptoms of dementia. American physicians had very low expectations from their older patients, so they accepted as “normal” behavioral changes that today are considered distinctly abnormal. This view had serious consequences for older people and their families.
