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Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on August 18, 2006
Rheumatology 2006 45(11):1328-1330; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kel259
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

EDITORIALS

Eponymophilia in rheumatology

E. L. Matteson and A. Woywodt1

Division of Rheumatology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN, USA and 1Division of Nephrology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany

Correspondence to: Eric L. Matteson, Division of Rheumatology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN 55905, USA. E-mail: matteson.eric@mayo.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

An eponym is the name of a drug structure or a disease based on or derived from the name of a person. Eponyms are widely used in medicine to denote both specific disease states and to honour those who discovered, described or best characterized them. Despite the attempts of some editors and medical schools to rationalize medical terminology and expunge many eponyms, eponymophilia lives on, mainly for reasons of convenience and, as many medical students suspect, to serve as a means by which one can either shine on rounds or be shamed by not knowing an eponym important to the consultant.

The enthusiasm for particular eponyms has waxed and waned over time. Increasing medical knowledge and changes in classification have made some of them obsolete while new eponyms continue to appear. Political events have influenced the use of some eponyms while others just fell out of fashion. A few examples . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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