EPONYMS--part 1:
I agree that it is time to retire eponyms for many reasons. As has been stated elsewhere, their use is often random, inconsistent, idiosyncratic, confused, and heavily influenced by local geography and culture, often to the exclusion of others that may deserve greater credit. Case in point—Crohn disease instead of Ginzburg or Oppenheimer, who arguably were more responsible for its description than he who came first alphabetically. Or when in Turkey, it’s Behçet disease; but on the other side of the Aegean, Adamantiades gets credit too.
In the last several decades, some of the impetus for abandoning eponyms, especially within rheumatology, has been the realization that some of the physicians/scientists for whom these conditions are remembered were less than honorable people. Hans Reiter was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials for his medical experiments at Buchenwald, being responsible for at least 200 deaths due to experimentally contracted typhus. Friedrich Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and as a high-ranking military physician at a facility that performed experiments on prisoners may well have turned a blind eye.
EPONYMS--part 1:
I agree that it is time to retire eponyms for many reasons. As has been stated elsewhere, their use is often random, inconsistent, idiosyncratic, confused, and heavily influenced by local geography and culture, often to the exclusion of others that may deserve greater credit. Case in point—Crohn disease instead of Ginzburg or Oppenheimer, who arguably were more responsible for its description than he who came first alphabetically. Or when in Turkey, it’s Behçet disease; but on the other side of the Aegean, Adamantiades gets credit too.
In the last several decades, some of the impetus for abandoning eponyms, especially within rheumatology, has been the realization that some of the physicians/scientists for whom these conditions are remembered were less than honorable people. Hans Reiter was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials for his medical experiments at Buchenwald, being responsible for at least 200 deaths due to experimentally contracted typhus. Friedrich Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and as a high-ranking military physician at a facility that performed experiments on prisoners may well have turned a blind eye.