List of eponymous diseases  

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"As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground."--Stendhal syndrome excerpt in Rome, Naples, and Florence by Stendhal

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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 such as an actor or the subject of a literary allusion, because characteristics associated with them were suggestive of symptoms observed in a particular disorder.

Contents

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.Template:Citation needed Reasons for this include:

  • The name confers history;
  • A national or ethnic bias attaches to the eponym chosen;
  • Credit should have gone to a different person;
  • An eponym may be applied to different diseases, which creates confusion;
  • Several eponyms refer to one disease (e.g., amyloid degeneration is variously called Abercrombie disease, Abercrombie syndrome, and Virchow syndrome);
  • An eponym proves invalid (e.g., Laurence–Moon–Bardet–Biedl syndrome, in which findings in the patients of Laurence and Moon were later found to differ from those of Bardet and Biedl).
  • An eponym honors an individual who has been otherwise discredited (e.g., Wegener's Granulomatosis is named for Friedrich Wegener, a Nazi physician). It was renamed to granulomatosis with polyangiitis when Dr. Wegener's Nazi ties were discovered.
  • Its referent varies by country (e.g., sideropenic dysphagia is Plummer–Vinson syndrome in the US and Australia, Patterson–Kelly syndrome in the UK, and Waldenstrom–Kjellberg syndrome in Scandinavia).

Arguments for maintaining eponyms include:Template:Citation needed

  • The eponym may be shorter and more memorable than the medical name (the latter requiring abbreviation to its acronym);
  • The medical name proves to be incorrect;
  • The syndrome may have more than one cause, yet it remains useful to consider it as a whole.
  • It continues to respect a person who may otherwise be forgotten.

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 entry for the same disease. There are three conventions that have been applied to these instances:

1. No separate entry appears for the alternative eponym. It is listed only in the parenthetical 'aka' entry (e.g., Aarskog syndrome appears only as a parenthetical entry to Aarskog–Scott syndrome).
2. If eponymous names subsequent to the first are sequenced differently or the eponym is differentiated by another term (e.g., disease versus syndrome), alphabetical sequence dictates which is the linked version versus which is listed as the alternative (e.g., Abderhalden–Kaufmann–Lignac is the linked entry and Abderhalden–Lignac–Kaufmann is the parenthetical alternative entry).
3. If the number of names included in two or more eponyms varies, the linked entry is the one which includes the most individual surnames (e.g., Alpers–Huttenlocher syndrome is the linked entry for the disease also known as Alpers disease or Alpers syndrome).

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See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "List of eponymous diseases" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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