Solomon Carter Fuller

Solomon Carter Fuller was born on the eleventh of August 1872 at Monrovia, Liberia, the son of Solomon Carter Fuller Sr. — a Liberian government coffee planter and the principal commissioner of the Liberian Republic of the period — and Anna James Fuller, a Liberian missionary teacher. His paternal grandparents had been freed slaves from Norfolk, Virginia who had emigrated to the Republic of Liberia in 1853 under the American Colonization Society.

He was placed at six at the College of West Africa at Monrovia — the principal Methodist mission school of the West African coast — and was sent at seventeen in 1889 to the United States for further education. He completed the bachelor’s in medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine in 1893 and the doctor of medicine at the same institution in 1897.

He took the four-year psychiatric-and-neuropathological residency at the Westborough State Hospital at Westborough, Massachusetts from 1897 to 1901, becoming the first Black psychiatrist at any American state hospital.

He travelled to Germany in 1904 at the recommendation of his Boston University Medical School chair Dr. Edward Bayfield Tully — to whom Fuller had been the principal post-graduate research assistant — to take graduate-research study at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital of Munich under Emil Kraepelin and his then-junior staff member Alois Alzheimer.

He worked at the Munich Royal Psychiatric Hospital across the period 1904 to 1905 as a graduate research student in neuropathology — predominantly on the silver-stain histological-microscopy of brain-tissue samples of Kraepelin’s and Alzheimer’s clinical cases. He was a contemporary at the Munich laboratory of the principal Alzheimer assistants Gaetano Perusini and Karl Bonhoeffer.

He was the first to publish in English — in 1907 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease — the histological-microscopy findings of the disease subsequently named for Alois Alzheimer, the so-called Alzheimer’s disease. The 1907 Fuller paper was the first English-language publication of the disease and the first English-language description of the principal neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques of the disease.

He returned to the Westborough State Hospital and the Boston University Medical School in 1905, where he was named associate professor of pathology and dean of the Department of Neuropathology. He held the Boston University positions for the following thirty years until his retirement in 1933.

He trained across his Boston University tenure the principal early generations of Black American psychiatrists — many of whom rose to the head of the psychiatric programmes at the principal Black-American hospitals of the post-war period.

He published across the 1907–1933 period over thirty scientific papers — among them the principal 1911 systematic histopathological-review study Alzheimer’s Disease and Senile Brain Pathology, the 1912 Histopathology of the Schizophrenic Brain Tissue, and the 1924 The General Paretic Brain.

He was elected in 1937 a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association — the first Black fellow of the Association.

He lost his sight to diabetes-related glaucoma in the closing years of his life. He died at Framingham, Massachusetts on the sixteenth of January 1953 of complications of diabetes, at eighty.

He is honored here as the first Black psychiatrist.