Talk:List of eponymous diseases

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I've started this page as a beginnings of a repository of medical eponyms. An important resource is WhoNamedIt.com, an encyclopedic site dedicated completely to this aim. I try to link through most eponyms to that site, instead of copying all the stuff from there. Please add any medical eponym you can think of! There must be thousands of them! Jfdwolff 14:56, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

  • Just added a bunchful. From my old list at everything2.com :-) Alex.tan 15:38, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'd just like to point out that none of the diseases on this list are eponymous, by definition: it's the people they're named after who are the eponyms. Perhaps this should be "List of diseases named after people". Or "List of epynomic diseases", which is apparently the correct adjective. --Paul A 02:32, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

  • For better or for worse, this distinction has faded from the language. Both the disease and the person are eponymous: "of or relating to an eponym". Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate further defines eponym both as the one for whom something is named, and "a name (as of a drug or disease) based on an eponym". No one will ever find a "List of epynomic diseases", and if they do, they will look in vain for "epynomic" in most dictionaries. - Nunh-huh 02:48, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I am going to embark on a comprehensive listing of eponymous diseases and syndromes and eponymous medical signs. As part of this I'll remove any signs from this page and move them to list of eponymous medical signs. Also, as the listing by medical specialty is not comprehensive I'll remove it and concentrate on an alphabetical list. Dave 10:16, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Apostrophe

I've removed the following text

There is controversy over the naming conventions for eponymous diseases. Many sources now agree that an apostrophe should be used if the disease is named after the patient, and no apostrophe if the disease is named after the physician (for example, Down syndrome). However, older conventions are still commonly in use, and usage in practice is effectively random.

since I believe this is a medical urban myth. It fails on two points:

1. There are very very few eponymous diseases named after the patient. This article mentions Christmas disease. Another that comes to mind is Lou Gehrig's disease, though this is only so-named in the US. The article What's in a Name: The Eponymic Route to Imortality lists Hartnup disease and Mortimer's disease.

2. I can't find any evidence that anyone follows this distinction for that reason.

To my mind, it smacks of a rationale being invented to explain a convention. There isn't even any logic behind it (mind you, logic and grammar were never best friends). Since the above text was added anonymously, I have been unable to correspond with the author to establish the source of the information.

There is a better explanation for the shift in style away from an apostrophe: The article What's in a Name by Len Leshin, MD, FAAP (2003) mentions a report in the Lancet (1974, i:798.) regarding a conference by the US National Institute of Health in 1974. The attendees agreed to drop the apostrophe, stating: "The possessive form of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder." I would be grateful if someone with access to this report could confirm the quotation.

It appears that medical dictionaries and style guides remain divided on the issue. See Lexical Leavings 106.

--Colin 23:56, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

The reasoning behind "since the author neither had nor owned the disorder" is a classic case of people incorrectly believing they are experts in linguistic issues just because they speak the language. Since this kind of naive nonsense was publicly declared in a resolution by educated people who should know they are only experts in medicine but not the relevant field, this is of course especially embarrassing. Any professor of English or any linguist could have explained to the US National Institute of Health that "possessive case" is a misnomer for the genitive case because this fulfills many more functions in English than indicating possession ("having" or "owning"). A two weeks' notice is not owned by the weeks and the same is true of a midsummer night's dream. This is called the classifying or objective genitive (see Genitive), and it is just as much nonsense to turn these constructions around into *"dream of a midsummer night" as *"disease of Parkinson". The only (half) excuse for the missing genitive with "syndrome" is because one can't hear it before the word "syndrome", which also explains but does not provide justification for "parallel mentions on reputable sites of "Asperger syndrome" and "Asperger's disorder" noted on Talk:Asperger_syndrome.
In the name of seeming political correctness, basic rules of the language are being violated. "Parkinson's disease" is clearly correct and older usage (in the US too) than "Parkinson disease", which is arguably still ungrammatical today despite being increasingly common (like the still erroneous but increasingly common "master degree"). The fact that usage on a large share of Internet pages and even of US edu pages (and on even larger share of UK pages) resists this idiotic resolution proves that this change will probably not become accepted in general use even if all the medical experts should agree, and they haven't, at least yet, as the above Lexical Leavings link and the following links show:
- "I do medical transcription and medical editing and work in an environment adamant about using currently correct terminology practices. The current practice is no apostrophe for eponyms." and "Most of the medical reference stuff in the cyberworld still has the apostrophe though." by an expert on presumably US usage here
- Asperger's syndrome, Down's syndrome, Parkinson's disease
- the WHO's standard calls for Down's syndrome
- http://www.pdf.org/AboutPD/index.cfm but http://www.parkinson.org/site/pp.asp?c=9dJFJLPwB&b=71354
On the other hand, this may be part of a general trend in the English language that is just moving faster in the US but not something foreign to UK usage, and the medical experts at the NIH conference perhaps correctly noticed this linguistic trend but gave naive and incorrect reasons for following this trend. We need a real (linguistic) expert's opinion, and the following also quoted from here will have to serve that function until an English professor or linguist is asked to look at this talk page:
"Even as recently as early 20th century, it was considered "improper" or ungrammatical to use a noun to modify another noun as in "bird wing" although phrases like "wing feather" were by then becoming very common. In Middle English (before mid 1500's) one would have been obliged to say "birdes wing.""
Until we get a linguistic expert's opinion, all Wikipedia article's should be rewritten in accordance with something like the beginning of Down_syndrome, but even that is incorrect in its absoluteness: as the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute clearly states, this is not a clear-cut situation in the US either although this is incorrectly claimed on Down_syndrome and its talk page:
"For medical eponyms, the use of the possessive form (‘s) is becoming progressively less common, e.g. Down syndrome instead of Down's syndrome.."
--Espoo 20:08, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
There is nothing wrong with deciding on a preferred form to be used throughout Wikipedia, and the current chaos of articles being called "Parkinson's disease" and "Down syndrome" throughout the encyclopedia and even next to each other in this list of eponymous diseases should be abolished, but this should not take the form of erroneously claiming that one or the other is incorrect because the situation is clearly in the middle of a change. This is especially true because "Parkinson's disease" is clearly older and in that sense "better" English that has nothing to do with "owning or having". I suggest that the names of all eponymous disease articles in Wikipedia be changed to either the natural, normal English form "Parkinson's disease" or the new, pseudo-PC "Parkinson disease" but that the other form be listed at the beginning of each article as also possible and without any stigmatisation. --Espoo 18:28, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NIH naming

"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."

This statement is incorrect. The reference given is a short notice of the intent to have a "workshop [that] will convene later." The notice does mention eponyms as part of a proposed nomenclature, but not as is often quoted ("The possessive use of an eponym should be discontinued (e.g., Down—not Down's—syndrome).").

I have not been able to find the results of the workshop, if such exists. TedTalk/Contributions 17:23, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

The correct citation and quote are now on the page. TedTalk/Contributions 20:20, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

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