Born into a working-class family, Auguste had three siblings and was a daughter of Johannes Hohmann.

She attended school in Cassell, and it is speculated that she may have been a student of Dr. Alois Alzheimer's grandfather, Johann.

Further education was not possible for Auguste due to social norms and her family's financial situation.

She continued this career until she married Carl August Wilhelm Deter on 1 May 1873, at the age of 23.

After marrying Carl, Auguste moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where she was a full-time housewife.

Auguste and Carl were married for 33 years until her death on 8 April 1906 at the age of 55, just five weeks shy of her 56th birthday.

Auguste started to become inattentive with housework, purposely hid objects and lost her capacity to cook.

She also developed insomnia, which caused her to drag sheets outside the house and scream for hours in the middle of the night.

As a railway worker, Carl was unable to provide adequate care for his wife and was given recommendations by a local doctor to admit her into a mental hospital.

Carl visited Auguste whenever possible, though he struggled to make payments for her care and stay.

Having difficulty keeping up with the payments, Carl continued insisting on getting her into a more affordable facility.

When asking Alzheimer for an arrangement of hospital transfers, Alzheimer discouraged him from such a decision; instead, he offered him an agreement for her to continue to receive care without cost in exchange for her medical records and brain after death, to which Carl gave a signed consent.

More than a century later, her case was re-examined with modern medical technologies, where a genetic cause was found for her disease by scientists from Gießen and Sydney.

According to this paper, a mutation in the PSEN1 gene was found, which alters the gamma-secretase function and is known as a possible cause of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

[5] However, the results could not be replicated in a more recent paper published in 2014 where "Auguste D's DNA revealed no indication of a nonsynonymous hetero- or homozygous mutation in the exons of APP, PSEN1, and PSEN2 genes comprising the already known familial AD mutations.

She could barely remember details of her life and frequently gave answers that had nothing to do with the question and were incoherent.

In 1902, Alzheimer left the Irrenschloss (Castle of the Insane), as the Institution was known colloquially, to take up a position in Munich, but made frequent calls to Frankfurt inquiring about Deter's condition.

With the aid of Italian physicians Gaetano Perusini and Francesco Bonfiglio, they carefully examined her brain to discover senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.

[9] In these documents, Dr. Alzheimer had recorded his examination of his patient, including her answers to his questions: "What is your name?"