Auguste D. (patient)
From Psy3241
Auguste Deter was born on May 16, 1850 in Cassel, Germany. She grew up in a protestant town of mostly home workers, small traders, and artisans who were eventually forced to assimilate into the Prussian empire in 1870. Her father died when she was relatively young and she had three siblings in her working class family. Auguste attended much school and according to research, was possibly a student of Alois Alzheimer’s grandfather, Johann. Auguste began working as either an assistant seamstress or in the ‘service’ for a middle class family when she was fourteen. In 1873 at the age of 23, Auguste married Karl Deter and moved to Frankfurt, Germany. Karl worked as a railway clerk and was in the Angestellte class and eventually they had a daughter, Thekla.
In 1901, Karl became concerned with a change in Auguste after she accused him of infidelity. After this event, Auguste began to neglect her housework, hide household objects, and make mistakes with her cooking. She declined rapidly and became restless, disturbing neighbors with her noise and paranoid ideas about others. In November 1901, Karl took Auguste to their family doctor who declared that with her symptoms of memory loss, mania, sleeplessness, restlessness, and inability to do mental or physical work, she should be committed to a mental institution. On November, 26, 1901, Auguste was admitted to the Municipal Asylum for the insane and epileptic, where Dr. Alois Alzheimer practiced.
During her time in the asylum, for the most part, she screamed loudly and exerted aggression towards others, but on rare occasions, she was courteous and kind towards others. Auguste spent most of her days in the bathtub (it was thought to soothe agitated patients) and most of her nights in the isolation room. Dr. Alzheimer kept her at this mental institution so he could study her, and Karl continued to struggle to pay her health fees and visit her as often as possible. By 1905, she was described as being completely bewildered, always in her bed, regularly soiling herself, and unable to feed herself. By the end of her life, she was constantly agitated, did not respond to sedatives, and was put in the bath every day. She developed sepsis and pneumonia and died on April 8, 1906.
Throughout Auguste’s time at the asylum, Dr. Alzheimer took on her case and studied her frequently. He took many notes on her diminishing memory and eventually described her as showing progressive cognitive impairment, focal symptoms, hallucinations, delusions, and psychosocial incompetence. He referred to her symptoms as senile dementia of the Alzheimer type which later became known as Alzheimer’s disease. Auguste D. became the first person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
