What’s in a Name? The Eponynsic Route to Immortality ‘4umber 47 November 21, 1983 In our day-to-day lives, we frequently ship, as well as in many areas of popular encounter places and things named after culture. Even in music we have the soxo - people. Streets, airports, and towns are phone, named for Adolphe Sax, the Bel- often named after individuals. So are gian instrument maker, and the sousa- commonly used machines, such as the phone, named for John Phdip Sousa, the diesei engine, and clothlng, such as the American bandmaster, And, oddly rnackintodt ruincoat. This form of nam- enough, Beethoven appears to have in- ing honors a person who makes some spired an engineering eponym, the Bee- contribution to our culture. The term tho ven exploder, a machine used for fir- for a person so honored is “eponym.” ing multiple detonators of explosives in Thus, Rudolf Diesel is the eponym of the tunneling and quarrying.s Yet one diesel engine. would be hard put to determine exactly The term eponym is derived from the how many eponyms each field can Greek words epi, meaning upon, and claim. Webster’s unabridged dictionary onyma, meaning name. 1 In addition to lists about 9,000 eponyms in all fields. designating the namesake of a word, The Eponyms Dictionaries Index (EDI), eponym has a second meaning—a term edited by James A. Ruffner, Wayne or phrase den”ved from a person’s State University Science Library, De- name. 2 By this definition, diesel engine troit, Michigan, lists 20,000 eponyms is also an eponym. The second usage overall, as well as 13,0C0 eponymized seems to be gaining ascendancy and persons.J clearly predominates in the literature The number of eponyms in the EDI is consulted for thk essay. It is this mean- so large because it includes many that ing for this homonymous word that is are no longer capitalized. When an ep- used here. onym is no longer capitalized, it’s a sign In the sciences, eponymy is a hal- that the term has been fully absorbed in- lowed tradkion. It often honors the dk- to everyday language. This is the ulti- coverer of a law or theorem, as in New- mate tribute to the person eponymized. ton’s law of gmvitation; the describer of But by the time it occurs, the link be- a new disease, as in A ddison’s pernicious tween word and person is usually lost. anemia; or the inventor of new equip- For example, how many dancers today ment, as in the Bunsen burner. Scientists realize that the inventor of their costume are far more frequently eponymized was Jules L&otard, a nineteenth-century than humanities scholars. According to trapeze artist? He said of the leotard, Cyril L. Beechmg, compiler of A Dic- “Do you want to be adored by the tionary of Eponyms,d painters and musi- ladtes?... Put on a more natural garb, cians are least often eponymized. which does not hide your best fea- Nevertheless, some eponyms are tures.”b (p. 168) Popular eponyms are found in almost every field of scholar- like popular trademarks in this respect. 384 When completely absorbed into the lan- Greek mythology has provided some guage, immortals soon become, as Jim- modern eponyms as well. In medicine, my Durante would say, “moralized.” the Ulysses syndrome 10 describes the L60tard, like most people who are phenomenon of a doctor subjecting a eponymized, is associated with only one healthy patient to a battery of unneces- eponym. But five or ten eponyms maybe sary diagnostic tests, because of idial created in the wake of an eminent scien- test results outside the “normal” range. tist. The record is held by a nineteenth- Like Ulysses, the patient ends up some- century French chemist named Georges what wome for wear, after much fruitless Deniges,J of whom I had never heard exploration. The Hermes syndrome, 1I until now, Although clearly not a house- coined in response to medical journal hold word, at least in the US, Deniges in- editorials on theft from medical li- spired 78 eponyms, primarily tests and braries, takes its name from the god of reagents, such as Deniges’s test for sele- thieves. nium and Deniges k benzoyl reagent. Literature, too, supplies us with scien- Better known scientists such as Albert tific eponyms. The Pick wickian syn- Einstein and Isaac Newton have been drome, 12 a type of breathing difficulty identified with only about 40 eponyms associated with obesity, is named after each. the portly character calIed “the fat boy” Many of the eponyms used today have in Charles Dickens’s Pick wick Papers. been introduced since the rise of modern The Jeky[l-and-Hyde syndrome, 13which science in the sixteenth and seventeenth describes dramatic changes in the be- centuries. But eponymy is an ancient havior of elderly patients, is named after practice. Some of the earliest recorded the leading character in Robert Louis eponyms date from the first and second Stevenson’s famous story. millennia BC, when the Assyrians Although, strictly speaking, eponymy named each calendar year after a high refers to terms named after persons, official.7 Historians have relied heavily geographic eponyms also occur in scien- on lits of these named years (eponym tific nomenclature. The Fmmingham lists) to reconstruct Assyrian history. study, a long-term investigation of the For example, kings usually gave their epidemiology of atherosclerotic d~ease, names to the first year of their reign. So takes its name from the study site, Fra- it was possible to estimate the length of a mingham, Massachusetts. 14 Similarly, reign intervening between two succes- Lyme disease, a form of arthritis caused sive kings’ names by counting the num- by tick-borne bacteria, was named for ber of names on the eponym list. The the town of Lyme, Connecticut, where number of names usually equals the the ficst cases occurred. 15Another vari- number of years in the reign of the first ation on the theme of eponymy is the king. Thus, the long reign of Sennacher- corporate eponym. An example is Le- ib, the Assyrian empire-builder men- gionnaires’ disease. This epidemic form tioned in the Old Testament for hk siege of pneumonia was named for the Ameri- of Jerusalem, was fixed between 704 and can Legion members who were among 681 BC.8 its first known victims. lb Incidentally, Simiiarly, in ancient Athens, the name naming a dkease for the patient rather of the archon, an official who held office than the doctor is unusual but not un- for one year, was used to designate each heard of. Hartnup k disease, 17a heredh calendar year.y The year 594 BC was tary metabolic disorder, and Mortimerk named after Solon, the great lawgiver. disease, la a skin condition, are among The Greeks also named places after the few so named. their heroes. 1 Thus, the Peloponnesus The vast majority of scienttilc ep- region takes its name from the mytho- onyms, however, are named after indi- logical figure Pelops, a grandson of vidual scientists. Perhaps the most epon- Zeus. ymized scientists are horticulturists and 385 botanists, whose names are routinely in- D.R. Lovett, University of Essex, Col- voked in naming plants, particularly chester, England .21 Clausius’s state- those they have identified. The genera ment, Helmh oltz’s equation, Einstein h Darlingtonia, Do wningia, Gmysia, and theory of relativity, and the Kelvin tem - Halesia all commemorate renowned bot- pemture scale all commemorate the anists. Beechmg asserts that eponymic work of giants in these fields. Many species of roses alone “would fill a vol- commonly used chemical methods are ume.”d (p. 8) Furthermore, almost every eponymic, including the Hofmann rear- common house and garden plant has an mngement, the Wittig reaction, and the eponymic name. Thus we have the dahi- Eschenmoser hydrolysis. Furthermore, ia, the forsythia, and the fuch~ia, which science honors early pioneers in elec- honor the botanists Anders Dahl, Wil- tricity and magnetics in naming such liam Forsyth, and Leonhard Fuchs, re- fundamental units as the volt, ohm, spectively. Eponyms also account for ampere, coulomb, farad, and oersted.zz such odd-sounding plant names as bou - Other fields, such as mechanical engi- gainviliea, cattleya, mfflesia, and zoysia. neering and economics, have their own In bacteriology the naming of species lists of eponyms. But medicine has a par- is also heavily eponymic. In fact, both ticularly rich eponymic tradition. I’ve the genus and species names of the or- already mentioned several eponymic ganism Rickett.sia pro wazeki honor indi- syndromes and diseases, The I[lustmted viduals. This organism, which causes Dictionary of Eponymic Syndromes and epidemic typhus, is named for the pa- Diseases and Their Synonyms~ lists thologist Howard Ricketts and the zool- about 9,000 more. Th~ was compiled by ogist Stanislas von Prowazek, whose my old friend Stanley Jablonski, Na- lives it claimed. 19 tional Library of Medicine, Washington, In addition, many names of minerals DC, who is now working on a new edi- are derived from proper names. A num- tion. A selection of highly cited papers ber of the minerals used by humankind associated with syndromes and diseases since antiquity have been named for included in the dictionary are listed in places. Bronze is a corrupted form of Table 1, Brundisium (now Brind~i) in southern In add~tion, many diagnostic tests, in- Italy, and copper a corrupted form of struments, and anatomical parts have Cyprus. But the tendency in the last eponymic names. Thus we have the several centuries has been to name new Quick test (for blood clotting), named minerals in honor of scientists.