[Alzheimer: did he discover or create Alzeheimer's disease?].

Abstract

This paper reviews and discusses the two opposing interpretations which have been given of the emergence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the medical literature (1906-1911). The commonest interpretation is that Kraepelin coined the eponym in order to describe a disease that had been discovered by Alzheimer. In the last years, however, a growing number of authors argued that Alzheimer and Kraepelin did not discover but create AD, that they did not proceed like botanists cataloguing species in an exotic garden but rather like sculptors carving shapes out of formless matter. The paper emphasizes the interests and the limits of both approaches and proposes an alternative approach which insists on Alzheimer's reasoning and argues that he neither 'discovered' nor 'created', but invented AD.