Medical Pioneer. He was the German physician, who first reported on a patient with dementia, later termed as "Alzheimer's Disease." Born Aloysius Alzheimer in Marktbreit, Bavaria in southern Germany, his father served in the office of the local Notary Public. Young Alzheimer attended universities in Aschaffenburg, Tübingen, Berlin and Wuerzburg, where he received his medical degree in 1887. He began his internship working with the mentally ill, then began working for the city mental asylum in Frankfurt, Germany. Noted German physicians Emil Sioli and Franz Nissl also worked there and mentored Alzheimer, working together to help their patients. It is believed that much of Alzheimer's later work on brain pathology derived from Nissl's research on the brain. Although Alzheimer wrote extensively for the medical journal "Zeitschrift fuer die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie" (Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry), he never wrote of his research in a book. Beginning in 1901 and for the next five years, Alzheimer began a detailed study of a patient named Mrs. Auguste Deter, then aged 51 years, who suffered from strange mental behavior including short-term memory loss. Following her death in April of 1906, Alzheimer discovered amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in her brain, using Dr. Nissl's techniques for staining brain tissue for microscopic examination. On November 3, 1906, Alzheimer presented his findings to the German Medical Society, linking pathology and presenile dementia together for the first time. Since German was the international language of science at that time, the publication of Alzheimer's speech and discussion in later medical textbooks made his name famous. By 1911, Alzheimer's Disease was being diagnosed on patients in the United States. In December of 1915, while on a train going to the University of Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), where Alzheimer had accepted a position as Professor of Psychiatry, he fell ill from rheumatic fever and kidney failure, dying of heart failure shortly after his arrival in Breslau.