Abraham Myerson

Born in Jonava in the Russian Empire (now Lithuania) on November 23, 1881, he came to the United States as a child and grew up in Boston. Before entering medicine, he worked a range of jobs, including as a streetcar conductor, then studied at Columbia and graduated from Tufts Medical School in 1908.

He built his career in neurology and psychiatry in Boston, teaching at Tufts and working at institutions including Boston Psychopathic Hospital. He became known for research on personality, emotion, and the heredity of psychiatric and neurologic illness, and he published books such as The Foundations of Personality.

He is still remembered in medicine for “Myerson’s sign,” a reflex finding described in neurologic examination. Some of his writing also reflected the early-20th-century influence of eugenic thinking, which makes his legacy important as both a contribution to medical history and a reminder of the limits and biases of that era.