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Difino
| • | An eponymous disease is one that has been named after the person who first described the condition. This usually involves publishing an article in a respected medical journal. Rarely an eponymous disease may be named after a patient (examples include Christmas disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Hartnup disease and Mortimer's disease).
Related disease namings include place names (Bornholm disease, Lyme disease, Ebola hemorrhagic fever) and even societies (Legionnaires disease). These, however, are not eponyms.
Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honour: "eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard" (Merton R K, 1973). It is regarded as bad form to attempt to eponymise yourself. At a time when medicine lacked the tools to investigate the underlying causes of many syndromes, the eponym was a convenient mechanism for attaching a label to a disease. In order to freely discuss something, it must have a name.
In 1974, the US National Institutes of Health held a conference where the naming of diseases and conditions was discussed. This was reported in The Lancet (1974;i:798) where the conclusion was that "The possessive form of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder." Medical journals, dictionaries and style guides remain divided on this issue.
There is a trend away from the use of eponymous disease names towards a medical name that describes either the cause or the primary signs. Reasons for this include:
· The name confers no information other than the historical.
Source: [wikipedia: list of eponymous diseases]
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