Moritz Heinrich Romberg

Moritz Heinrich Romberg (1795 to 1873) was a German physician and neurologist. Born in Meiningen in Thuringia, he lost his father, a Jewish merchant, early, after which his mother moved with him and his younger sister to Berlin, where he spent the rest of his life. Between 1840 and 1846 he published a classic multi-volume textbook on nervous diseases, and he is considered a pioneer of neurology and has been called the first clinical neurologist. He is best remembered for Romberg's sign, the unsteadiness a patient shows when standing with the eyes closed, which he described in his original account of tabes dorsalis, the disease caused by syphilis damaging the back of the spinal cord. The sign reflects a loss of the sense of limb position that vision normally compensates for. Edward Henry Sieveking translated his textbook into English in 1853, and his nephew Eduard Heinrich Henoch was also a physician.