Auguste Deter

Auguste Deter (German pronunciation: [aʊ̯ˈɡʊstə ˈdeːtɐ]; 16 May 1850 – 8 April 1906) is the first person diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Her maiden name is unknown. She married Karl Deter in the 1880s and together they had one daughter. Auguste had a normal life. However, during the late 1890s, she started showing symptoms of dementia, such as: loss of memory, delusions, and even temporary vegetative states. She would have trouble sleeping, would drag sheets across the house, and even scream for hours in the middle of the night.

Karl could not take it any more. Being a railway worker, he had to admit her to a mental institution so that he could continue to work. He brought her to the Institution for the Mentally Ill and for Epileptics in Frankfurt, Germany, on 25 November 1901 where she was examined by Dr. Alois Alzheimer. He asked her many questions, and later asked again to see if she remembered. He told her to write her name. She tried to, but would forget the rest and repeat: "I have lost myself." (German: "Ich hab mich verloren.") He later put her in an isolation room for a while. When he released her, she would run out screaming, "I do not cut myself. I will not cut myself." Her words have been commemorated in an important work, commissioned by the Susquehanna Valley Chorale, composed by Robert Cohen and librettist Herschel Garfein, entitled "Alzheimer Stories".

Contra

Contra is a Latin preposition (also used in English as a prefix) meaning "against". It may also refer to:

Finance

Media

Music

Video games

Contras

The contras (some references use the capitalized form, "Contras") is a label given to the various U.S.-backed and funded rebel groups that were active from 1979 through to the early 1990s in opposition to the left-wing, socialist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government in Nicaragua. Among the separate contra groups, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) emerged as the largest by far. In 1987, virtually all contra organizations were united, at least nominally, into the Nicaraguan Resistance.

From an early stage, the rebels received financial and military support from the United States government, and their military significance decisively depended on it. After US support was banned by Congress, the Reagan administration covertly continued it. These covert activities culminated in the Iran–Contra affair.

The term "contra" comes from the Spanish contra, which means against but in this case is short for la contrarrevolución, in English "the counter-revolution". Some rebels disliked being called contras, feeling that it defined their cause only in negative terms, or implied a desire to restore the old order. Rebel fighters usually referred to themselves as comandos ("commandos"); peasant sympathizers also called the rebels los primos ("the cousins"). From the mid-1980s, as the Reagan administration and the rebels sought to portray the movement as the "democratic resistance," members started describing themselves as la resistencia.

Contra (video game series)

Contra (Japanese: 魂斗羅, Hepburn: Kontora) is a video game series produced by Konami composed primarily of run and gun-style shoot-'em-ups. The series debuted in 1987 as a coin-operated arcade game simply titled Contra, which was followed by the release of Super Contra in 1988 and several sequels produced for various home platforms.

The in-universe use of the term "Contra" is first explained within the Japanese instruction card of the arcade version of Contra, and reiterated in most games (including Contra: Shattered Soldier), as "a title awarded to a superior soldier possessing almost super human drive and ability, while excelling in guerrilla tactics".

In Japanese, the title is spelled with the kanji characters 魂斗羅 or Kontora. This is a form of ateji, in which the characters are used for their phonetic pronunciations rather than any inherent meaning they may have.

The arcade version of Contra was released on February 1987, a few months after the Iran–Contra affair was made public. While it is unclear whether the game was deliberately named after the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the ending theme of the original game was titled "Sandinista" (サンディニスタ, Sandinisuta), after the adversaries of the real-life Contras.