Excerpt from In Pursuit of Memory by Joseph Jebelli, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After five years of study surrounded by these ideas, Dr Aloysius 'Alois' Alzheimer was licensed to practise medicine for the German Empire. His interest was in psychiatry, so he applied for an intern position at the Frankfurt Mental Asylum and was chosen for the job on the same day the application was received. When Alzheimer arrived at the asylum there was certainly no shortage of work to be done. The director, Emil Sioli, desperately needed help after the asylum's sole medical assistant retired and the only relief doctor on duty had accepted a job offer elsewhere. The twenty-four-year-old Alzheimer was faced with 254 patients and one exhausted mentor.

Though magnificent from the outside, the inside of the asylum was anything but. Like most things German at the time, it aimed to set the standard for ingenuity and so imposed the modern 'non-restraint' principle of treating patients, designed by the English psychiatrist John Conolly for a more humane treatment of the mentally ill. Straitjackets were forbidden. But as Alzheimer found out, this approach was not without its downsides: non-restraint also meant no forced feeding, bathing or cleaning. And with so many patients and so few staff, conditions soon spiralled out of control. As Alzheimer mused:

Alzheimer immediately began to make changes. He introduced long baths where particularly uncontrollable patients could wind down; large consultation rooms where the doctors could talk and develop a dialogue with the patients; and special rooms designated solely for the microscopic examination of brain tissue. In this setting Alzheimer dived head first into research. Inspired by his years at Berlin University, he spent hours at the microscope, analysing hundreds of patient samples. The hunt for the biological origin of brain disease had begun.

Excerpted from In Pursuit of Memory by Joseph Jebelli. Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Jebelli. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.