List Of Eponymously Named Diseases
Some diseases have been named after the person who first described the condition. This usually involves publishing an article in a respected medical journal. Rarely an eponymous disease may be named after a patient (examples include Christmas disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Hartnup disease and Mortimer's disease).
Related disease namings include place names (Bornholm disease, Lyme disease, Ebola hemorrhagic fever) and even societies (Legionnaires' disease). These, however, are not eponyms.
Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in Western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honour: "eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard" (Merton R K, 1973). It is regarded as bad form to attempt to eponymise oneself. At a time when medicine lacked the tools to investigate the underlying causes of many syndromes, the eponym was a convenient mechanism for attaching a label to a disease. In order to freely discuss something, it must have a name.
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