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Alois Alzheimer has been widely credited with the discovery of the eponymous disease.

Oskar Fischer published a description of the disease the same year as Alzheimer.

Alzheimer’s disease may have seen treatments sooner if Fischer’s work hadn't been buried by antisemitism.

German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer is widely credited with having identified the eponymous disease. However, a lesser-known Czech scientist, Oskar Fischer, separately identified the disease in a 1907 publication, the same year that Alzheimer’s findings were published. Why was Fischer not recognized for the discovery along with Alzheimer?

Geopolitical factors in Europe between World War I and World War II led to Fischer’s marginalization because he was Jewish. Despite groundbreaking achievements in dementia research, he was fired from his position at the German University of Prague and cut off from the university’s laboratory resources. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and eventually murdered.

In addition to the tragedy that befell Fischer personally, the rise of authoritarianism stymied crucial scientific research that could have brought us closer to treating this disease.

Alzheimer, the eccentric German psychiatrist, had a fencing scar on the left side of his face and kept a pet monkey (Karlawish, 2021). In 1907, he published a case report of a patient, Augusta D. She was a previously healthy woman who was hospitalized in 1901 when her husband, a railway clerk, could no longer care for her. Although only in her early 50s, she exhibited severe memory impairment, a decline in her ability to communicate, and the inability to care for her basic needs.

Alzheimer took a strong interest in her case and treated her until she died in 1906 from the mysterious illness. When her husband was planning to transfer her to a state asylum, Alzheimer personally paid for her to remain at the hospital. Having married the widow of a diamond merchant, Alzheimer was wealthy, and at times even paid for staff salaries and equipment (Karlawish,........

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