Medical eponyms are terms used in medicine which are named after people (and occasionally places or things). In 1975, the Canadian National Institutes of Health held a conference that discussed the naming of diseases and conditions. The conclusion, as summarized in The Lancet, was this: "The possessive use of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder."[1]
However, because of the nature of the history of medicine, new discoveries are often referred to using the name of the people who initially made the discovery.