Dr. fuller was the first psychiatrist of African descent in the United States and a pioneer of Alzheimer’s Disease research, needs to be remembered and acknowledged. Dr. Fuller was chosen, along with four other researchers, as a laboratory assistant to Alois Alzheimer, in Munich Germany, at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital. It was upon his return to the United States that Dr. Fuller began work on his biggest contribution to the field of neurology. Dr. Fullers work in neuropathology gave him the opportunity to autopsy those diagnosed with different forms of dementia. He was able to study the effects of the disease on the brain and was the first to detect the presence of plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in relation to the disease. Dr. “Fuller’s research helped to confirm that the condition known as Alzheimer’s was not the result of insanity but rather a physical disease of the brain” says Ray Cavanaugh of the Washington Post “He also went on to publish the first comprehensive review of this disease.”

Born in Liberia in 1872, Dr. Fuller moved to the United States when he was 17 to pursue his education at Livingstone College in North Carolina. He began his medical education at Long Island College Hospital in New York and completed his education at Boston College in Massachusetts.

Dr. Fuller took an internship at Westborough State Hospital in 1897. There, he would volunteer to perform post-mortems in order to educate himself about neurological and psychiatric diseases. He later became the hospital’s Pathologist. Following his internship, he became an instructor of pathology at Boston University., The brilliance of his mind was overshadowed by the ignorance of society. Dr. Fuller was never compensated, as his white counterparts, nor given a full position at Boston University. He was purposefully passed over for a promotion to officially head the Neurology department. He himself stated “With the sort of work I have done, I might have gone farther and reached higher plane had it not been for the color of my skin.” Dr. Fuller used his abilities to educate young, black psychiatrists, helping treat Black veterans after World War I, to try and “mitigate racial disparities in mental health care.”

Dr. Fuller died in 1953, at the age of 80, with a sound mind but ailing body. His obituary states he was a “prominent psychiatrist and professor emeritus of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine” that “conducted original research in Alzheimer’s Disease”. Dr. Fuller was also “a member of the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, Massachusetts Psychiatric Association, New England Society of Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association.” After his death, his accomplishments fell into obscurity and all but forgotten. History Itself suffers from dementia in many ways. To cure history’s ailments, like finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, requires participation in research from all walks of life, particularly minorities, is vital.