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 literary or theatrical character who exhibited signs of the disease or the subject of an allusion, as its characteristics 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." The scientific and medical communities regard it as bad form to attempt to form eponyms after oneself. Ideally, to discuss something, it should have a name. When medicine lacked diagnostic tools to investigate and definitively pinpoint the underlying causes of most diseases, assigning an eponym afforded physicians a concise label for a symptom cluster versus cataloguing the multiple systemic features that characterized a patient’s illness. 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, Christmas 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 conventions 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. 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, such as 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 Organisation 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." 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. 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." Medical journals, dictionaries and style guides remain divided on this issue. European journals tend towards continued possessive use, while US journals are largely discontinuing to do so. Trends in possessive usage vary among countries, journals, diseases. The problem is that the possessive case received its misleading name for historical reasons and now even educated people, if they are not linguists, often make incorrect assumptions and decisions based on the name. Nevertheless, native speakers would neither accept the awkward construction "men department" as an alternative to "men's department" nor claim that the obligatory apostrophe in any way implies that men possess the department. This case was termed the genitive until the 18th century and (like the genitive case in other languages) expresses much more than possession. For example, in the expressions "the school's headmaster" and "tomorrow's weather", the school does not own/possess the headmaster and tomorrow does not/will not own the weather. Disagreements about the use of possessive forms of nouns and of the apostrophe are due to the opinion that no apostrophe should be used, unless it is intended to express possession. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says:
The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one's own terminology. After the 18th-century grammarians began to refer to the genitive case as the possessive case, grammarians and other commentators got it into their heads that the only use of the case was to show possession.... Simply changing the name of the genitive does not change or eliminate any of its multiple functions. The dictionary also cites a study which found only 40% of possessive forms used to indicate actual possession.
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