Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Wilhelm Heinrich Erb

  • Origins of the knee jerk

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Reflex hammers are the icon or hallmark of every neurologist. How important are the reflexes they elicit? What is their mechanism? The advent of modern technology has made it easy to forget how important the skills and means in eliciting physical signs were to clinicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth…

  • Tendon reflex hammers

    JMS Pearce East York, England The vogue for reflex hammers started with Erb and Westphal’s adjacent papers1,2 in the 1875 issue of the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, which described the tendon or muscle stretch reflex. Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840-1921) read medicine at Heidelberg where he remained for most of his life. The leading neurologist in…