Solomon Carter Fuller

In 1912, Solomon Carter Fuller published a comprehensive review of the disease Alois Alzheimer had first described a few years earlier, drawing together the case reports and brain-tissue findings that physicians were still learning to recognize. He had also translated Alzheimer's early papers into English. At a moment when the condition now called Alzheimer's disease was new to medicine, Fuller's work helped English-speaking doctors understand what German researchers were seeing under the microscope.

Fuller had prepared for that work abroad. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1872, the grandson of former American slaves, he came to the United States at 17 and studied at Livingstone College and Boston University before working at Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. In 1904, he joined Alzheimer's laboratory in Munich as one of five visiting foreign researchers. He examined brain tissue there, staining and studying the characteristic plaques and tangles the disease leaves behind, then returned to Westborough the following year.

Boston University describes him as the nation's first Black psychiatrist. He taught pathology and neurology at the university's medical school and carried out department leadership duties, but he was denied the formal title of department chair and was paid less than white colleagues doing comparable work. Those were the terms on which a Black physician built an academic career in early twentieth-century America, and Fuller built one anyway.

His influence reached the next generation directly. He selected and trained three Black physicians to practice psychiatry at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital, extending the profession's doors to men who would have found them closed elsewhere.

He died in 1953. Boston University continues to honor his name in its Alzheimer's research programs, and the American Psychiatric Association's award for achievement in Alzheimer's disease research carries his name. The disease he helped introduce to English-speaking medicine is now among the most studied conditions in the world, and the review he published in 1912 is part of how that study began.

He graduated from Boston University's medical school in 1894, began his internship at Westborough State Hospital, and was promoted to pathologist there two years later. His autopsies of patients who had died with dementia supplied the tissue evidence behind his review of the disease's early literature.