Robert Wartenberg

Robert Wartenberg was a clinical neurologist and professor, born in 1887 in Grodno in what was then the Russian Empire. He studied at Kiel, Munich and Freiburg, took his degree at Rostock in 1919, and trained under Max Nonne in Hamburg and Otfrid Foerster in Breslau. A Rockefeller travelling fellowship in 1925 and 1926 brought him to Harvey Cushing in Boston. In the early 1930s he led the neurological clinic at the University of Freiburg until the Nazi civil service law removed him because he was Jewish. He emigrated to San Francisco in 1935 or 1936 and taught at the University of California, San Francisco. He wrote more than 150 papers and four books, helped found the American Academy of Neurology, and is commemorated by several neurological signs and a yearly lecture. He died in 1956.