La enfermedad del olvido

Alzheimer's is the disease of forgetfulness. The patient does not recognize us or know who he is. But he is there; smile, he is a person. This book introduces us to what this disease is, in personal terms, and what it represents in terms of the dignity of a being without memories and dependent on the care and memory of others. It offers us a careful reflection on personal identity, the meaning of being a person, the role of memory and forgetting in personality, and on how to morally face the situation created by this widespread and today incurable neurodegenerative disease. Faced with Alzheimer's patients, ethics has to ask questions that cannot remain mere theoretical questions. Diseases that affect personal identity, so strange and yet so close, attract us as much as they repel us because they are logically saying something about us. It is no coincidence, then, that a philosopher like Norbert Bilbeny has been attracted to studying the human experience and the moral derivations of Alzheimer's, both those of the patient and those of those who accompany him.