In his time, Adolf Wallenberg (1862–1949) was renowned for his careful history taking and neurological examination, and for his insistence on clinicopathological confirmation. With Edinger and Gordon Holmes, he described the avian brain. He was responsible for relating the olfactory system to recognition and taste for food; he documented the anatomy of the trigeminal lemniscus in 1900; and provided a clinical masterpiece in his depiction of lateral medullary infarction, remembered as Wallenberg's syndrome.1

The earliest known description of lateral medullary infarction was given in 1810 not by Wallenberg, but by Gaspard Vieusseux of Geneva,2 at the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London:

  “Vertigo, unilateral facial numbness, loss of pain and temperature appreciation in the opposite limbs, dysphasia[sic] and hoarseness, minor tongue involvement, hiccups (cured by taking up the habit of a morning cigarette) and a drooped eyelid.”

However, Wallenberg's case report3 in 1895 amplified the clinical signs with accurate localisation of the lesion, which he later proved at postmortem.

Wallenberg published four papers on the syndrome. The 1895 paper provided the clinical findings in his first patient. Based on the anatomical work of Duret, Wallenberg thought that the …