List of eponymous diseases
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 suffered from the disease; rarely, a fictional character who exhibited signs of the disease; and, in some few instances, after an actor or the subject of a literary allusion, because characteristics associated with them were suggestive of symptoms observed in a particular 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 eponymise oneself. 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. Some diseases are named for the person, most often 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's disease, Hartnup disease, and Mortimer's disease. In one instance, Machado–Joseph disease, the eponym is derived from the surnames of two families in which the condition was initially described. Examples also exist of eponyms named for fictional persons who displayed characteristics attributed to the syndrome; these include Miss Havisham syndrome, named for a Dickens character, and Plyushkin syndrome, named for a Gogol character (the two also happen to be alternative names for the same symptom complex). At least two eponymous disorders follow none of  the foregoing conventions: Fregoli delusion draws its name from an actor whose character shifts mimicked the type of delusion it now describes; Munchausen syndrome 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, Ebola virus disease) are properly termed toponymic, although an NLM/NIH online publication described them as eponymic. Similarly, diseases named for societies, as in the case of Legionnaires' disease, are not eponyms, nor are those named for their association with a particular  occupation or trade, examples including nun's knee, tennis elbow, and mad hatter's disease. The latter instances are properly styled as occupational conditions or 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." 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 use of the possessive, while US journals are largely discontinuing its use. The trend in possessive usage varies between countries, journals, and diseases. 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. In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage: This dictionary also cites a study that found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession. 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 an individual who was affected by or died as a result of the disease which he had described or identified or, in the case of a non-physician patient, from which the patient suffered. 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 who first described it and the possessive form in cases of a disease named for a patient (commonly, but not always, the  first patient) who had the particular disease. 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. 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. 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 below), followed by an in-line parenthetical entry beginning 'aka' ('also known as') that lists all alternative eponyms. This facilitates 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. There are three conventions that have been applied to these instances: List of eponymous