More than a hundred years ago, German physician Alois Alzheimer did a grim postmortem analysis of the dementia-ravaged brain of one of his patients. He hoped to unmask the biological roots of her severe and rapid mental deterioration and bizarre mood swings. Her name was Auguste Deter, and she was admitted to the Hospital for the Mentally Ill and Epileptics in Frankfurt in 1901. When Alzheimer first interviewed the 51-year-old woman, she was enveloped in a fog of confusion, and she exhibited delusional behavior: She was intensely jealous of her husband; she sometimes would start screaming, thinking people wanted to kill her; and she became wild and uncontrollable. She died five years later.
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