As longtime TCR readers with good memories know, Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a German neurohistologist who, in 1906, reported the phenomenon of plaques and tangles in the brain of a 51 year-old woman who had died after five years of progressive dementia (TCR October 2003). His boss, Emil Kraepelin, recognized it as a discrete disease and called it "Alzheimer's Disease." Because the earliest patients were relatively young, the term was initially used for presenile dementia, but was eventually broadened to include all "plaque and tangle" disease. Having produced his doctoral thesis on the less-than-auspicious topic of the wax-producing glands of the ear, Alzheimer ultimately contributed to the understanding of epilepsy, neurosyphilis, and Huntington's chorea, and characterized the eponymous Alzheimer's baskets (pathological clumps of filaments between nerve cells) and Alzheimer's sclerosis (cellular degeneration of small cerebral blood vessels), all while practicing clinical psychiatry. He also developed Alzheimer's stain (a method of detecting Negri bodies, pathognomonic of rabies), perhaps following in the footsteps of his good friend and colleague Franz Nissl, of purple stain fame. Like his contemporary in the distantly related field of psychoanalysis, he was rarely seen without his cigar.

Sources: http://www.ibro.info/Pub_Main_Display.asp?Main_Id=34 http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/177.html