A History of Memory: What the Ancients Understood about Alzheimer's

Nov 24, 20243 min read

Writer: Chandana Herlekar Editor: Mishka Mittal

Have you ever stopped to think about how the ancients understood diseases such as Alzheimer's? While the term "Alzheimer's" may only be roughly 115 years old, the disease has been around for centuries.

Picture this: It's Ancient Greece, and the great philosopher Pythagoras (570–495 B.C.) is talking about the five stages of life: ages 7, 21, 49, 63, and 81. According to him, life began with youth and vigor, then wisdom took the forefront. However, the last two stages were where things got fuzzy. These stages were designated the "senium", or old age—a period of decline of mental capacities and decay of the body. The few who managed to survive to this time were expected to "degenerate in mind to a level of suckling baby and finally become stupid” (Yang et al.). To many ancient thinkers, this old-age memory loss was simply an unavoidable part of life and not a disease. However, it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.), a Roman philosopher and politician, who pointed out that aging doesn't always cause a decline in mental ability, except in people with weak will. Essentially, he made a massive conceptual breakthrough by indicating that dementia was not an inevitable result of aging.

Image 1: Philosopher Pythagoras (570-495 BC)

For many years, memory loss and confusion were accepted as a mysterious, inevitable fog that descended upon the elderly. The Ebers papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical document that dates back to 3400 B.C.E., describes in detail the symptoms, causes, and treatment for mental disorders such as dementia. The ancient Egyptians would associate mental diseases with the influence of evil spirits and angry Gods. They also believed that the heart was in control of memory and not the brain, so memory loss was a sign of the heart losing its power—something that supposedly happened to everyone with age.

Moving onto the Middle Ages, it was very common for mental disorders like dementia to be considered a punishment imposed by God for sins committed. Patients with dementia were accused of being witches and, therefore regular victims of witch-hunts, burnings, and hangings in the 15th century.The word “dementia” in Latin literally means “to be out of one's mind”, a generic name for mental illness, madness, and isolation.

However, it was not until 1906 that a German psychiatrist, Alois Alzheimer, identified and carefully recorded the first case of the disease in his patient, Auguste Deter, a woman in her 50s who developed memory, language, orientation problems, and delusional thinking. She often answered interview questions by saying "I have lost myself, so to say." In 1910, Dr. Emil Kraepelin, who worked with Dr. Alzheimer, named the disease after his mentor. In recent years, dementia has become less stigmatized, although there still remain places in the world where a significant number of people do not seek treatment due to poor understanding, fear of social stigma, or even isolation from family—We have come so far but there is still a long way to go!