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I read with great interest the letter of Barbara Nieradko-Iwanicka entitled “National eponyms in medicine” [1]. I wish to congratulate the author and extend my thanks to her for addressing the subject of medical eponyms, which I have been interested in for many years. I also found a very interesting comment on the paper by Yale et al. [2], who focused on the rationale of usage of eponyms in medical terminology. The subject of eponyms in medicine is very broad, and I am limiting my comments to a few linguistic and historical aspects only. 1. Eponym in linguistics is a word or phrase derived from a proper noun. In a broad sense the term is used also for the meaning of the proper noun, i.e. a person, animal, place, thing or phenomenon. In order to avoid ambiguity, the term eponimism (different from “eponym”, i.e. a person or thing that “gives” the name) was suggested but has not been generally accepted. Historically, the eponym (from Greek εππνυμος = the one who is giving the name) was a municipal official in Ancient Greece honoured by using his name as the name of the month in the local calendar. It is important to distinguish names of streets, schools, hospitals (e.g. Spartańska Street, Albert Einstein Medical College) from eponyms although some terms which were initially only names evolved into eponyms. The Hoover Company was founded by William Henry “Boss” Hoover, and became a famous producer of vacuum cleaners. Over the years, the term “hoover” became a synonym of vacuum cleaner (like in Europe the words “lux” and “electrolux”) and the verb “to hoover (something)” is used for cleaning a carpet, floor, etc., with a vacuum cleaner. 2. Generally, there are two type of eponyms: eponyms which became common words, and those that denote more specific medical phenomena. Proper nouns are capitalized in English or the eponymous part of the term is capitalized. An example of the first type of eponyms is the word “pasteurization”. Obviously, the word originated from the name of the great French scientist Louis Pasteur. When we drink a glass of milk poured from a milk carton with an inscription “pasteurized milk” we do not always have at the back of our minds the great experiments of Louis Pasteur. The second type of eponyms is very common. Several diseases, symptoms, signs, surgical procedures or tools, clinical or laboratory tests, reagents as well as anatomical or pathological structures are named with eponyms. Currently, non-possessive style is recommended, e.g. the term Cushing disease is preferred to Cushing’s disease [3]. The vast majority of eponyms are derived from names of physicians who described for the first time medical phenomena or invented tools, tests or procedures. Nurses gave names to some eponyms as well (e.g. Sister Mary Joseph nodule, a metastatic lesion of the umbilicus [4]). There are also medical eponyms originating from geographical terms, for example, as mentioned by Nieradko-Iwanicka, Rocky Mountain spotted fever or Warsaw breakage syndrome, a rare heritable disorder characterized by microcephaly, growth retardation and abnormal skin pigmentation [5]. Some eponyms were coined from names of fictitious literary characters. The most famous is Pickwick syndrome, a literary description of which can be found in the famous novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens. Another eponym coined from the name of a heroine of a story with Polish roots is Yentl syndrome. The story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” was written in 1962 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and later adapted for the stage and a romantic musical drama film. Yentl Mendel was a girl living in Poland in an Ashkenazi shtetl (i.e. a small town with a large Jewish population). She secretly received instruction in the Talmud delivered to her by her father, Rabbi Mendel. Such instruction was prohibited to women according to the custom of the community. After her father’s death, Yentl cut her hair short, wore men’s clothes and took her late brother’s name (Anschel) in order to be admitted to a Jewish religious

Medical eponyms from linguistic and historical points of view