Adolf Wallenberg

Adolf Wallenberg (1862 to 1949) was a German internist and neurologist, born in Preussisch Stargard into a Jewish family and trained at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig, where he received his doctorate in 1886. He worked at the municipal hospital in Danzig, where he settled as a practitioner and from 1907 to 1928 directed the department of internal medicine, becoming a professor in 1910. His research with Ludwig Edinger described the avian brain and the part played by the olfactory system in recognising and eating food, and he later published the yearly reports on the anatomy of the central nervous system from 1895 to 1928. He gave the clinical description in 1895 and the autopsy findings in 1901 of occlusion of the posterior inferior cerebellar artery, which bears his name as Wallenberg's syndrome. Driven from his laboratory and his work under the Nazis because he was Jewish, he emigrated to Great Britain in 1938 and to the United States in 1943, and died in Manteno, Illinois.