Excerpt from The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three days later, Alzheimer made further notes:

On what street do you live? I can tell you, I must wait a bit. What did I ask you? Well, this is Frankfurt am Main. On what street do you live? Waldemarstreet, not, no. . . . When did you marry? I don't know at present. The woman lives on the same floor. Which woman? The woman where we are living. The patient calls Mrs G, Mrs G, here a step deeper, she lives. . . . I show her a key, a pencil and a book and she names them correctly. What did I show you? I don't know I don't know. It's difficult isn't it? So anxious, so anxious. I show her 3 fingers; how many fingers? 3. Are you still anxious Yes. How many fingers did I show you? Well this is Frankfurt am Main.

Auguste died on April 8, 1906. By then, Alzheimer had moved from Frankfurt to the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich, so he had Auguste's brain sent there, where he "sampled thin slices of this brain tissue, [and] stained them with silver salts." After affixing these slices between glass slides, "Alzheimer put down his habitual cigar, removed his pince-nez, and peered into his state-of-the-art Zeiss microscope. Then, at a magnification of several hundred times, he finally saw her disease."

Summer passed and in the fall, on November 4, Alzheimer presented his findings at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tübingen. Auguste, he said, had "progressive cognitive impairment, focal symptoms, hallucinations, delusions, and psychosocial incompetence." More to the point, the cells in her cerebral cortex showed weird abnormalities.

Excerpted from The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy. Copyright © 2015 by Anil Ananthaswamy. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.