Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller is a black history medical pioneer. He has been widely acknowledged as the first African-American psychiatrist but also underappreciated as a pioneer of Alzheimer's disease, having studied directly under Alois Alzheimer himself.
Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller was originally from Liberia and immigrated to the US at the age of 17. His parents, Solomon C and Anna Ursilla Fuller were Liberian-American. His grandfather was a formerly enslaved person who bought his and his wife’s freedom and helped establish a settlement of formerly enslaved Black Americans in Liberia.
Upon arrival in the US, he attended Livingstone College in North Carolina, later attending Long Island College Medical School, and completed his medical degree at the Boston University School of Medicine in 1897. Like other Black professionals in the medical field, Carter faced discrimination, underpayment, and underemployment and often performed duties other physicians saw as unimportant or undesirable. While performing autopsies that other physicians didn’t want to perform, he made several medical discoveries that contributed to the medical community’s understanding of pathologies.
Dr. Fuller became associate professor of both pathology and neurology at Boston University by 1921. He was one of five research assistants selected by Alois Alzheimer to work in his laboratory at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Munich, an experience that undoubtedly paved the way for trailblazing research in Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Fuller was the first to translate much of Alzheimer's pivotal work into English, including that of Auguste Deter, the first reported case of the disease. He published what is now recognized to be the first comprehensive review of Alzheimer's disease, in it reporting the ninth case ever described. His achievements, in a period when African-American physicians were under-represented, deserve greater recognition.
Upon his retirement, Fuller was given the title of emeritus professor of neurology at Boston University, although he continued to practice neurology and psychiatry in Massachusetts and for a period in Pennsylvania. After dedicating much of his life to medicine and research, Dr. Fuller died in 1953 at age 81.
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