List of eponymous diseases explained

An eponymous disease is a disease, disorder, condition, or syndrome named after a person, usually the physician or other health care professional who first identified the disease; less commonly, a patient who had the disease; rarely, a fictional character who exhibited signs of the disease or an actor or subject of a literary allusion, as characteristics associated with them were suggestive of symptoms observed in the disorder.

Naming systems

Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in Western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: "Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard."[1] The scientific and medical communities regard it as bad form to attempt to eponymise oneself.[2]

Ideally, to discuss something, it should have a name. When medicine lacked diagnostic tools to investigate and definitively pinpoint the underlying causes of many diseases, assigning an eponym afforded physicians a concise label for a symptom cluster versus cataloguing the multiple systemic features that characterized the patient.

Most commonly, diseases are named for the person, usually a physician, but occasionally another health care professional, who first described the condition—typically by publishing an article in a respected medical journal. Less frequently, an eponymous disease is named after a patient, examples being Lou Gehrig disease and Hartnup disease. In the instance of Machado–Joseph disease, the eponym is derived from the surnames of two families in which the condition was initially described. Examples of eponyms named for persons who displayed characteristics attributed to a syndrome include: Lazarus syndrome, named for a biblical character; and Miss Havisham syndrome, named for a Dickens character, and Plyushkin syndrome, named for a Gogol character, both fictional persons (the latter two also happen to be alternative names for the same symptom complex). Two eponymous disorders that follow none of the foregoing conventions are: Fregoli delusion, which derives its name from an actor whose character shifts mimicked the delusion it describes; and, Munchausen syndrome which derives from a literary allusion to Baron von Munchausen, whose personal habits were suggestive of the symptom cluster associated with it.

Disease naming structures which reference place names (such as Bornholm disease, Lyme disease, and Ebola virus disease) are properly termed toponymic, although an NLM/NIH online publication described them as eponymic.[3] Diseases named for animals with which they are associated, usually as a vector, are properly styled as zoonymic; cat scratch fever and monkeypox are examples. Those named for association with a particular occupation or trade, examples of which include nun's knee, tennis elbow, and mad hatter's disease, are properly described as occupational diseases.

In May 2015, the World Health Organization, in collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), released a statement on the Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases "with the aim to minimize unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups."[4] These guidelines emerged in response to backlash against people and places, based on the vernacular names of infectious diseases such as Middle East respiratory syndrome, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic.[5] These naming conventions are not intended to replace the International Classification of Diseases, but rather, are guidelines for scientists, national authorities, the national and international media and other stakeholders who may be the first to discuss a disease publicly.

Punctuation

In 1975, the Canadian National Institutes of Health held a conference that discussed the naming of diseases and conditions. This was reported in The Lancet where the conclusion was summarized as: "The possessive use of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder."[6] Medical journals, dictionaries and style guides remain divided on this issue. European journals tend towards continued use of the possessive, while US journals are largely discontinuing its use.[7] The trend in possessive usage varies between countries, journals, and diseases.[8]

The problem is, in fact, that the possessive case was given its misleading name for historical reasons and that now even educated people, if they are not linguists, often make incorrect assumptions and decisions based on this misleading name. Nevertheless, no native speakers would accept the ungrammatical "men department" as a possible way of saying "men's department" nor claim that this "possessive" and obligatory apostrophe in any way imply that men possess the department.

This case was called the genitive until the 18th century and (like the genitive case in other languages) in fact expresses much more than possession. For example, in the expressions "the school's headmaster", "the men's department", and "tomorrow's weather", the school does not own/possess the headmaster, men don't own/possess the department, and tomorrow does not/will not own the weather. Most disagreements about the use of possessive forms of nouns and of the apostrophe are due to the erroneous opinion that a term should not use an apostrophe if it does not express possession.[9]

In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:[10]

This dictionary also cites a study[11] which found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.[12]

Autoeponym

Associating an individual's name with a disease merely based on describing it confers only an eponymic; the individual must have been either affected by the disease or have died from it for the name to be termed autoeponymic. Thus, an 'autoeponym' is a medical condition named in honor of: a physician or other health care professional who was affected by or died as a result of the disease which he had described or identified; or, a patient, who was not a health care professional, but suffered from or died as a result of the disease.[13] Autoeponyms may use either the possessive or non-possessive form, with the preference to use the non-possessive form for a disease named for a physician or health care professional who first described it and the possessive form in cases of a disease named for a patient (commonly, but not always, the first patient) in whom the particular disease was identified.[14] Autoeponyms listed in this entry conform to those conventions with regard to the possessive and non-possessive forms.

Examples of autoeponyms include:

Eponyms and trends

The current trend is away from the use of eponymous disease names and towards a medical name that describes either the cause or primary signs.[4] Reasons for this include:

Arguments for maintaining eponyms include:

The usage of the genitive apostrophe in disease eponyms has followed different trends. While it remains common for some diseases, it has dwindled for others.[17]

Alphabetical list

Explanation of listing sequence

As described above, multiple eponyms can exist for the same disease. In these instances, each is listed individually (except as described in item 1 below), followed by an in-line parenthetical entry beginning 'aka' ('also known as') that lists all alternative eponyms. This facilitates the use of the list for a reader who knows a particular disease only by one of its eponyms, without the necessity of cross-linking entries.

It sometimes happens that an alternative eponym, if listed separately, would immediately alphabetically precede or succeed another eponymous entry for the same disease. Three conventions have been applied to these cases:

1. No separate entry appears for the alternative eponym. It is listed only in the parenthetical 'aka' entry (e.g., Aarskog syndrome appears only as a parenthetical entry to Aarskog–Scott syndrome).

2. If eponymous names subsequent to the first are sequenced differently or the eponym is differentiated by another term (e.g., disease versus syndrome), alphabetical sequence dictates which is the linked version versus which is listed as the alternative (e.g., Abderhalden–Kaufmann–Lignac is the linked entry and Abderhalden–Lignac–Kaufmann is the parenthetical alternative entry).

3. If the number of names included in two or more eponyms varies, the linked entry is the one which includes the most individual surnames (e.g., Alpers–Huttenlocher syndrome is the linked entry for the disease also known as Alpers disease or Alpers syndrome).

Some eponyms have an alternative entry that includes the name(s) of additional individuals. An example is Adams-Stokes syndrome; one of its alternative eponyms is Gerbec–Morgagni–Adams–Stokes syndrome. The entry for Adams-Stokes only names the two individuals (Adams and Stokes) whose names are associated with the entry as listed; the later entry for the alternative Gerbec–Morgagni–Adams–Stokes syndrome names all four of the individuals (Gerbec, Morgani, Adams, and Stokes) who are associated with the longer named entry.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Merton R K, 1973
  2. Book: Gordon . BL . Current medical information and terminology . 1971 . Chicago . 4th.
  3. Web site: How are genetic conditions and genes named?: MedlinePlus Genetics.
  4. WHO . World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases. . May 2015 . 3 . 24 June 2020 . WHO_HSE_FOS_15.1 . World Health Organization.
  5. Web site: WHO . News News releases Statements Notes for the media Previous years Commentaries Events Fact sheets Fact files Questions & answers Features Multimedia Contacts WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases . World Health Organization . 24 June 2020 . 8 May 2015.
  6. Classification and nomenclature of morphological defects . . 1 . 7905 . 513 . March 1975 . 46972 . 10.1016/S0140-6736(75)92847-0. 37636187 .
  7. Current use of medical eponyms—a need for global uniformity in scientific publications . Jana N, Barik S, Arora N . . 2009-03-09 . 9 . 18 . 19272131 . 2667526 . 10.1186/1471-2288-9-18 . free .
  8. PeerJ . 16 April 2013 . 1. e67. 10.7717/peerj.67. Whose name is it anyway? Varying patterns of possessive usage in eponymous neurodegenerative diseases. Macaskill MR, Anderson TJ . 23646286 . 3642700 . free .
  9. Web site: Neal Whitman . Possessives . quickanddirtytips.com . 2017-06-16 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170616011924/https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/possessives . 2017-06-16.
  10. Book: 475 . Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage . registration . 1994 . Merriam-Webster . 978-0-87779-132-4 .
  11. Book: Fries, Charles Carpenter . American English Grammar: The Grammatical Structure of Present-day American English with Especial Reference to Social Differences Or Class Dialects . registration . 1940 . Appleton-Century . (not checked by editor)
  12. Book: 475 . Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage . registration . 1994 . Merriam-Webster . 978-0-87779-132-4 . The only statistical investigation of the genitive case that we are aware of can be found in Fries 1940. Fries found that the possessive genitive was the most common, but that it accounted for only 40 percent of all genitives..
  13. Book: Segen, J. C.. The dictionary of modern medicine. 1992. Taylor & Francis. 9781850703211.
  14. Web site: For eponyms, AAMT advocates dropping the possessive form. MTStars. 23 July 2011.
  15. Book: Weiss, Emilio, Strauss, Bernard S.. 1991. The Life and Career of Howard Taylor Ricketts. Reviews of Infectious Diseases. The University of Chicago. 13. 1241–2.
  16. Thomsen, Julius. Tonische Krämpfe in willkürlich beweglichen Muskeln in Folge von ererbter physischer Disposition (Ataxia muscularis?). Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. Berlin. 1875. 6. 702–718. 10.1007/bf02164912. 46151878.
  17. Whose name is it anyway? Varying patterns of possessive usage in eponymous neurodegenerative diseases. PeerJ. 2013. 1. e67. 16 April 2013 . 10.7717/peerj.67. 3642700. MacAskill. Michael R.. Anderson. Tim J.. 23646286 . free .