In the 1970s and 1980s, advocacy organisations in the USA, such as the National Institute on Aging led by the late Robert Butler, began to develop forceful messages to garner resources for rapidly ageing populations. Denounced as a term lacking scientific rigour, “senility” was gradually phased out of the lexicon in favour of language that framed increasing prevalence of cognitive decline as a “disease epidemic” on par with, for example, polio and other infectious diseases. “Alzheimer's disease”—an eponym that had been largely dormant after its unheralded 1910 publication by the German psychiatrists Alois Alzheimer and Emil Kraepelin—experienced a nominal resurrection as the main driver of society's new epidemic. By comparing the scourge of Alzheimer's disease to polio, powerful expectations for a cure have been fomented, and western cultures have gradually come to view cognitive deterioration as the result of an unremitting disease process that exists outside the spectrum of normal age-related changes. To conquer these changes, a “war on Alzheimer's” has been launched spanning four decades.