Eponymy in English medical terminology

The rapid development of science and technology, the achievement of scientific and technological progress contribute to the emergence of special words to denote new objects, phenomena and processes in various fields of human activity. Special words become an integral part of a person’s daily life and are part of a specialized picture of the world of professionals. Recent decades have been marked by the intensive development of medicine. Modern medical literature contains many terms that have appeared in recent years. Terminology as a set of terms is part of a special vocabulary. One of the most extensive processes of medical terminology is eponymization.

Discussion . An eponym is the assignment of the surname of the author, patient, literary character, terrain, subject or phenomenon to the terms. As a rule, eponymous symptoms and syndromes in medicine are called by the name of the author who first described them (for example, Kozhevnikov’s syndromes, Goodpasture).Sometimes the names of eponymous syndromes were introduced spontaneously, and the authors did not manage to gain fame during their lifetime. So, the classic description of the clinical picture of capillarotoxicosis was given to Williams in

1808, Bateman in 1819 and Latour in 1828, however, the disease is called Schon-lein-Henoch syndrome, although Schonlein described it only in 1832, and Genoch described it in 1874 [1].

But there are many syndromes by the name of patients (Hageman, Hartnup syndromes) or even a monk (d'Acosta syndrome), story characters (Lasthenie de Ferjol syndrome), novels (Pickwick syndrome), legends (Ahasverus, Hiobus syndromes), geographical names (syndromes Akureyri, Ardmore) or the names of hospitals (symptom of the Obukhov hospital, Sassoon Hospital syndrome), the terms of the languages of different tribes (kwashiorkor, kuru syndromes) and the names of animals, for example, by the name of one of the species of mollusks (katayama syndrome) [2].

Eponyms are an integral part of medical terminology. In neurology, eponyms make up about 30% of the entire terminological fund, according to a dictionary edited by Samusev R.P. [1989]. The percentage of eponyms in the nomenclature of symptoms and syndromes is high. The growth of eponyms is explained by the desire to perpetuate the names of scientists and doctors who first discovered and described the phenomenon . An- other reason for the popularity of the eponym is that it is not always possible to find a satisfactory qualifying term in order to adequately reflect the symptom of a complex phenomenon or to indicate it briefly with one or more words.

The use of eponymous terms is determined by the following factors.

• 1.    The obvious advantage of eponymous terms is their brevity. It seems more convenient to use the short term “Fallot tetrad” instead of “congenital heart disease: a combination of stenosis of the mouth of the pulmonary trunk, defect of the interventricular septum, aortic displacement to the right, and secondary developing hypertrophy of the right heart”.

• 2.    According to some researchers, eponyms in different countries may be different for the same disease, it is considered positive – “this is part of their beauty and originality” [3]. For example, “sideropenic dysphagia” in Russia, the USA, Australia has an eponymous correspondence “Plummer-Vinson syndrome” – “Plummer-Winson syndrome”, in Russia and Great Britain – “Paterson Kelly's syndrome” – “Paterson-Kelly syndrome”, in Scandinavia – "Waldenstrom-Kjellberg syndrome" – "Waldenstrom-Kjelberg syndrome."

• 3.    Eponyms may change, evolve and decline as other linguistic phenomena. So, for example, three famous physicians of the 19th century Richard Bright (1789-1958), Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) and Thomas Addison (1793-1860) worked together at the Guy London Hospital. "Addison's disease" and "Hodgkin's disease" are widely known today, and the term "Bright disease" is outdated and has been replaced by "glomerulonephritis."

• 4.    It is impossible to simply “remove” eponymous terms. Who will decide which term is appropriate? How to avoid the influence of political views?

The usage of eponyms in medical discourse might have the following challenges.

• 1.    Eponyms, in most cases, give inaccurate information about the origin of a given phenomenon or disease. They are influenced by political factors, and, often, their emergence is simply explained by coincidence. So, for example, “Crohn’s disease” was named after American gastroenterologist B. Crohn (18841983), although earlier this disease was described by Giovanni Morgagni (1682-1771) and Anthony Lesnevsky (1867-1940) [4].

• 2.    The use of eponyms is often unacceptable for moral, ethical reasons. So, for example, the well-known term "Reiter's disease" was named after the German physician Hans Conrad Reuters (1981-1969), who appeared to have conducted Nazi experiments on prisoners of Sachsenhausen [5]. The publication of this fact led to the renaming of Reiter’s disease to the term “reactive arthritis”. However, Reiter's syndrome is still found in medical records and is used in medical schools.

• 3.    A single eponym may have several terms. For example, there are several meningeal symptoms (Upper, middle, lower, buccal) Brudzinskogo several symptoms and reflexes (exhalation, acromial, orbicular) Bechterew.

• 4.    There are eponymous terms that consist of three or even four surnames, which makes them cumbersome and inconvenient for practical use.

Conclusion . Eponyms play a significant linguistic role in technical and scientific terminology. The peculiarity of eponyms, formed from the names of researchers of science, lies in their main function – replacing long structures with shorter forms. In recent years, broad epimonization has been criticized quite reasonably, since eponymous terms often serve as sources of error and confusion. However, eponymous names make up a significant part of the term system and play a significant linguistic role in technical and scientific terminology.