Do you lose sleep at night worrying about eponyms? Apparently, a lot of researchers in academic medicine do. Perhaps your next question is: what the heck is an eponym? According to the Oxford dictionary:
[A] person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named.
In other words, eponyms can be described as academic bragging rights. For example, most adults probably know what a Fallopian tube is. It’s part of the female reproductive tract. But did you know it’s named after the Italian anatomist, Gabriele Falloppio, who lived and died in the 1500s? Falloppio was also an Italian priest, the last person you would expect to be an expert on female anatomy. Most of his work actually involved dissecting the human head. According to The New York Times:
An eponym was once considered medicine’s highest honor. Like monuments to great generals, they paid tribute to medicine’s most brilliant minds, ensuring their names would live on in perpetuity. The best-known example is the fallopian tubes, named after Gabriele Falloppio, an Italian priest and anatomist who is credited as being the first to describe them. Others include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Hodgkin’s diseases, all named for European medical men.
Some medical researchers don’t like eponyms and want them officially changed. Perhaps it’s sour grapes but there are other reasons, some of which I will explain below.
In most cases, the name change fit with medicine’s growing preference for descriptive terms over honorific ones. “Many of us just don’t use eponyms because they’re not anatomically informative,” said Jason Organ, an anatomist at Indiana University. Rather than a fallopian tube, he said, “uterine tube just makes more sense — it tells you what it is.” In some cases, the inconsistent use of eponyms can even lead to medical errors, Dr. Organ added.
What about old discoveries that seemingly honor dishonorable men? A growing chorus of researchers began weeding out Nazi-era doctors’ names, whose discoveries were related to discredited, unethical or questionable research.
So it was a shock when, in the early 2000s, dozens of eponyms were discovered to be linked to National Socialist doctors who had violated every value of medical consent and human dignity.
Wegener’s Granulomatosis, a disease of inflamed blood vessels, became Granulomatosis with polyangiitis. Clara cells that line the lungs and secrete mucus became club cells.
Reiter’s syndrome, a form of arthritis caused by a bacterial infection, was renamed “reactive arthritis”.
There were numerous other diseases, conditions or body parts renamed either due to the namesake’s sketchy past or to more accurately describe the condition.
Dr. Hans Asperger, an Austrian scientist in the 1930s who used his position to help save children like him. By devising a diagnosis that emphasized the children’s intellectual abilities, the psychiatrist said, Dr. Asperger tried to spare them from the Nazi campaign to “euthanize” youths with cognitive disabilities.
The problem is that by emphasizing those [Asperger’s] children with superior intellectual abilities, he condemned those with lower abilities. The term Asperger’s Syndrome has largely disappeared from medical literature for reasons (apparently) unrelated to its founder. Others point out that Dr. Asperger is hardly the one who made the most significant contributions to the field.
Dr. Sheffer notes another strike against eponyms: They often don’t even honor the right person. The term Asperger’s first emerged in the 1980s, at the suggestion of a British psychiatrist named Dr. Lorna Wing. Yet Dr. Wing conducted far more extensive research into the condition that would bear Dr. Asperger’s name. “He doesn’t deserve the credit,” Dr. Sheffer said. “If anything, we should use the name Wing’s syndrome because we’re going by her definition, not his.”
That touches on another important point. One person is rarely responsible for discoveries. It’s often a collaborative effort. Not mentioned in The New York Times article is the fact that some significant research credit in the 20th Century should be attributed to or shared by women but often went to their male research associates due to bias. Also notable is nowadays it seems Nobel prizes are often shared jointly by several people in the field.