Eponymous disease

An eponymous disease is a disease named after a person: usually the physician who first identified the disease or, less commonly, a patient who suffered from the disease.

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.

To discuss something, it must have a name. At a time when medicine lacked tools to investigate underlying causes of many syndromes, the eponym was a convenient way to label a disease.

Some diseases are named after the person who first described the condition—typically by publishing an article in a respected medical journal. Rarely, an eponymous disease is named after a patient, examples being Lou Gehrig's disease, Hartnup disease, and Mortimer's disease. In at least one instance, Machado-Joseph disease, the eponym is derived from the surnames of the patriarchs of two families in which the condition was initially described. Instances 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's character; these also happen to be alternative names for the same symptom complex. At least two eponymous disorders follow none of the foregoing conventions: Fregoli delusion, and Munchausen syndrome.

Related disease naming structures reference place names (Bornholm disease, Lyme disease, Ebola virus disease), and societies, as in the case of Legionnaires' disease. These, however, are not eponyms.

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