Solomon Carter Fuller

Early life and education Solomon Fuller was born on August 11, 1872, in Monrovia, Liberia, to Americo-Liberian parents of African-American descent. His father, Solomon, had become a coffee planter in Liberia and an official in its government. Fuller's mother, Anna Ursala (reported also as Ursilla or Ursula) James, was the daughter of physicians and medical missionaries. His paternal grandparents, John Lewis Fuller and his wife, had been slaves in Virginia. John Fuller bought his and his enslaved wife's freedom and they moved to the city of Norfolk, Virginia. The couple emigrated from there to Liberia in 1852, to a colony set up in West Africa by the American Colonization Society beginning earlier in the century. They helped establish the nation developed by African Americans and liberated African slaves.

He had a keen interest in medicine given that his maternal grandparents were medical missionaries in Liberia. Fuller moved to the United States to study at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, graduating in 1893. Later he attended Long Island College Medical School.

Career Fuller spent the majority of his career practicing as a neuropathologist at Westborough State Hospital in Westborough, Massachusetts. This is where he completed a two-year internship in neuropathology prior to being selected by Alois Alzheimer to conduct novel research at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, led by Emil Kraepelin. Approximately one year later, he returned to Westborough State Hospital with his new knowledge. He developed and edited the Westborough State Hospital Papers, a journal that began publishing results of local research. While working as a clinical pathologist, Fuller noted that amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles may be significant biomarkers for the study of Alzheimer's disease, separate from arteriosclerosis, the then-assumed cause of disease.

Fuller worked with patients with chronic alcoholism, noting the neuropathology of the disease. Fuller's seminal publications, a two-part review of Alzheimer's disease, came in 1912 and was the first English translation of the first Alzheimer's case. One 21st century researcher wrote that Fuller's discoveries had led to such "a major contribution to the body of clinical knowledge concerning Alzheimer's disease" that the neurodegenerative disease would have been named for him if Kraepelin had not insisted it be named for Alzheimer, Kraepelin's student.

In 1919, Fuller left Westborough State Hospital to join the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine. He served as an associate professor until 1933, at which time he left academia after recognizing racial disparities in the salary and promotion processes of his time. at the age of 80, due to advanced diabetes and gastrointestinal malignancy. It forms part of the Boston Medical Center, the primary teaching affiliate for Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. In the early 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association established a Solomon Carter Fuller Award lecture at its annual meetings. Fuller Middle School, named after him and his wife, a noted sculptor, is located in Framingham, Massachusetts. The school's history reads:

Dr. Solomon Fuller Way, on the site of the former Westborough State Hospital, is named after him.

Works by Solomon C. Fuller "A Study Of The Neurofibrils In Dementia Paralytica, Dementia Senilis, Chronic Alcoholism, Cerebral Lues And Microcephalic Idiocy", The American Journal of Psychiatry. Volume 63, Issue 4, April 1907, pp. 415–468-13. "A Study of the Miliary Plaques Found in Brains of the Aged", American Journal of Insanity 28(2) (1911). "Alzheimer's disease (senium praecox): the report of a case and review of published cases", Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, July 1912, Volume 39, Issue 7, pp. 440–455. with Henry I. Klopp, "Further Observations on Alzheimer's Disease", American Journal of Insanity 69 (1912): 26, 27. "Anatomic Findings of General Paresis and Multiple Sclerosis in the Same Case". Boston Society of Neurology and Psychiatry. Arch. Neurol. and Psychiat 5 (1921): 757-1921.