Marshall Hall and “Romberg’s sign”

Marshall Hall is famous, inter alia , for his concept of the spinal reflex arc1 when he demonstrated reflex function—an “excito-motory system”2—of the spinal cord and nerves in animals after removal of the brain. This ended the misconceptions that the soul and psychic functions resided in the cord as well as in the brain. Often overlooked, in his Lectures on the nervous system and its diseases (1836)3, he predated Romberg’s account of sensory ataxia, in tabes dorsalis. Hall plainly described the loss of postural control in the dark of a patient …