A Brief History: Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller

Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, the nation’s first Black psychiatrist, was a pioneer in Alzheimer’s disease research, leading to the discovery of biomarkers that help us better understand the causes and progression of the disease.

Dr. Fuller was born in 1872 in Monrovia, Liberia. He was the grandson of enslaved people in the United States who purchased their freedom and migrated to Liberia under the controversial American Colonization Fund, which paid for free American Blacks to return to Africa.

Dr. Fuller moved to the U.S. as a teenager to study medicine. In 1897, at the age of 25, he was awarded his medical degree from the Boston University School of Medicine. After completing a two-year internship at Westborough State Hospital, he became a hospital pathologist, performing autopsies that included analyzing tissue sections from deceased mental patients to support his research.

In 1904, Dr. Fuller was invited by Dr. Alois Alzheimer to be a graduate research assistant in connection with research into what was then called “presenile dementia”. Dr. Fuller joined Dr. Alzheimer’s research team at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Munich. As a neuropathologist, Dr. Fuller performed ground-breaking research on the physical changes that occur in the brains of people with this disease.

When Dr. Fuller returned to Westborough State Hospital a year later, he continued his research into neuropathology and dementia, identifying key biomarkers for presenile dementia. In 1912, he published what is now referred to as the first comprehensive review of Alzheimer's disease in 1912. He also worked with patients with chronic alcoholism, noting the neuropathology of the disease. As a leading scholar in the field, he established and edited the Westborough State Hospital Papers, a journal that began publishing results of local research.

In 1919, Dr. Fuller left Westborough State Hospital to join the faculty at his alma mater, the Boston University School of Medicine. He left the faculty as an associate professor in 1933, noting racial disparities in salary and promotions, but continued to maintain a private practice as a physician, neurologist, and psychiatrist for more than a decade. After World War I, he helped to recruit and train Black psychiatrists for key positions in an all-Black staff at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center.

Dr. Fuller lived in Framingham with his wife, the internationally-recognized sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and their three children. He stopped practicing medicine in 1944 after losing his eyesight, and he died in 1953 at the age of 80.

Dr. Fuller’s legacy as a researcher, scholar, and teacher is remembered through an annual Solomon Carter Fuller Award lecture established at the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. In Boston, the Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center (part of Boston Medical Center) is named after him.