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The contributions to history of African-Americans have been recognized annually since 1926, first as Black History Week and currently as Black History Month, during February. The first black psychiatrist in the United States, Solomon Carter Fuller (MED 1897), earned a degree in medicine and later taught at BU, which from its founding has accepted students without regard to race, religion, or sex. He retired in 1934 as a professor emeritus. Fuller’s grandfather was a former slave in Virginia who bought his freedom and immigrated to Liberia, where Fuller was born. Because his father was a successful planter, landowner, and public official there, Fuller was well schooled, and in 1889 he moved to the United States to attend college. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Livingston College in North Carolina and attending BU, Fuller in 1898 was appointed pathologist at Westborough State Hospital for the Insane in Westborough, Mass., where he studied schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, senility, and dementia. In 1905, he moved to Germany to study the pathology of the brain under Professor Alois Alzheimer, who identified the disease that takes his name. After returning to America, Fuller published in 1912 the first comprehensive clinical review of the eight Alzheimer’s cases that had been reported to date. His review included the ninth case of Alzheimer disease ever described, which he had identified. Fuller died in 1953, at the age of 81. A building on the Medical Campus, the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center, bears his name.
Photo by BU Photo Services
4
February 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations