List of Eponymously Named Diseases - Eponyms and Alternatives

Eponyms and Alternatives

There is a trend away from the use of eponymous disease names towards a medical name that describes either the cause or the primary signs. Reasons for this include:

• The name confers no information other than the historical.
• There can be a Western bias to the choices.
• History sometimes shows the credit should have gone to a different person.
• Different countries may have different eponyms for the same disease.
• Several eponyms may turn out to be the same disease (example: amyloid degeneration is also called Abercrombie's disease, Abercrombie's syndrome, and Virchow's syndrome).

Arguments for maintaining eponyms include:

• The name may be more memorable and shorter than the medical one (the latter requiring abbreviation to its acronym)
• Sometimes 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 give respect to a person who may otherwise have been forgotten.