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 form eponyms after oneself. Ideally, to discuss something, it should have a name. When medicine lacked diagnostic tools to investigate and definitively pinpoint the underlying causes of most
diseases, assigning an eponym afforded physicians a concise label for a symptom cluster versus cataloguing the multiple systemic features that characterized a patient’s illness. Most commonly, diseases are
named for the person, usually a physician, but occasionally another health care professional, who first described the condition—typically by publishing an article in a respected
medical journal. Less frequently, an eponymous disease is named after a patient, examples being
Lou Gehrig disease,
Christmas disease, and
Hartnup disease. In the instance of
Machado–Joseph disease, the eponym is derived from the surnames of two families in which the condition was initially described. Examples of eponyms named for persons who displayed characteristics attributed to a syndrome include:
Lazarus syndrome, named for a biblical character; and Miss Havisham syndrome, named for a
Dickens character, and
Plyushkin syndrome, named for a
Gogol character, both fictional persons (the latter two also happen to be alternative names for the same symptom complex). Two eponymous disorders that follow none of the foregoing conventions are:
Fregoli delusion, which derives its name from an actor whose character shifts mimicked the delusion it describes; and,
Munchausen syndrome which derives from a literary allusion to Baron von Munchausen, whose personal habits were suggestive of the symptom cluster associated with it. Disease naming conventions which reference place names (such as
Bornholm disease,
Lyme disease, and
Ebola virus disease) are properly termed toponymic, although an NLM/NIH online publication described them as eponymic. Diseases named for animals with which they are associated, usually as a vector, are properly styled as zoonymic; cat scratch fever and monkeypox are examples. Those named for association with a particular occupation or trade, such as
nun's knee,
tennis elbow, and
mad hatter's disease, are properly described as occupational diseases. In May 2015, the
World Health Organization, in collaboration with the
World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), released a statement on the Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases "with the aim to minimize unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups." These guidelines emerged in response to backlash against people and places, based on the vernacular names of infectious diseases such as
Middle East respiratory syndrome, and the
2009 swine flu pandemic. These naming conventions are not intended to replace the
International Classification of Diseases, but rather, are guidelines for scientists, national authorities, the national and international media and other stakeholders who may be the first to discuss a disease publicly. ==Punctuation==