Solomon Carter Fuller

Solomon Carter Fuller was born on 11 August 1872 in Monrovia, Liberia, into a family already marked by resolve. His paternal grandparents had been enslaved in Virginia and, having secured their freedom, emigrated to Liberia in the 1850s. His father, Solomon C. Fuller Sr., was a coffee planter and government official, and his mother, Anna Ursula James, was the daughter of physicians and medical missionaries. In this household of learning and faith, the boy's course toward medicine was set early.

At seventeen he crossed the Atlantic to the United States, studying at Livingstone College in North Carolina before earning his medical degree at Boston University School of Medicine in 1897. After an internship at Westborough State Hospital, he traveled in 1904 to the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Munich, where he was chosen as one of a small circle of research assistants to Alois Alzheimer and worked in the orbit of Emil Kraepelin — the formative apprenticeship of his scientific life.

Returning to America, Fuller advanced the young science of the aging brain. In a 1907 case series he described abnormal neurons and neurofibrils in dementia, and in 1912 he produced the first English translation and full review of Alzheimer's landmark case. He identified plaques and tangles as significant and argued the disease was distinct from arteriosclerosis. He is honored as the first African American psychiatrist, and later joined the Boston University faculty in pathology and neurology.

He taught and healed until 1933, resigning over the unequal pay and recognition denied him because of his race, yet his students revered him and his findings still guide research today. Married to the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, he died in Framingham, Massachusetts, on 16 January 1953. A pioneer who illuminated the brain even as others dimmed his due, Solomon Carter Fuller is remembered with honor.