Tag: Alzheimer’s
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Earliest instance of Alzheimer’s disease as defense in a 1924 homicide trial
Saty Satya-MurtiJoseph LockhartSanta Maria, California, United States In the mid-twentieth century, few doctors and even fewer members of the public had ever heard of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Interest focused on senile dementia and arteriosclerotic vascular dementia while presenile dementia was thought to be uncommon and received little attention.1 Yet as early as 1906, Alois Alzheimer…
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The anorexia of aging
Alexandra MignucciAlbany, New York, United States While working at a medical home for patients with Alzheimer’s, I became fascinated by the difference in how much food the patients would eat when sitting at the table as a group versus when I would feed them in their rooms or on the couch. There was no difference…
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Up north
Richard BentleyAmherst, Massachusetts, United States He had come to Northern Michigan, and the lake gulls were shrieking at him. He had been on vacation only two days, but he sat around the cabin, springing up now and then to go to the window and back. It was too chilly to go out to the beach.…
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The professor and the playwright on what it means to care
Fergus ShanahanWilton, Cork, Ireland Illness words are seldom simple. They can hurt or heal in different contexts or change their meaning over time. Nor are they always understood the same way by patients and doctors. Borrowing from Philip Larkin, it is “difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not…