Should medicine still bother with eponyms?

Beginning in 2000, after hearing a rumor that Dr. Friedrich Wegener had ties to National Socialism, Dr. Matteson and a colleague spent years combing World War II archives around the world. They eventually found out that Dr. Wegener one Nazi supporter who had worked three blocks of the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, possibly dissecting victims of medical experiments. In 2011, several major medical organizations have replaced Wegener’s syndrome with “granulomatosis with polyangiitis”—admittedly a mouthful. (“Wegeners” can still be found in the ICD-11.)

The hunt for Nazi names was on. Clara cells, a type of cell that lines the lungs and secretes mucus, were found to be named after a Nazi doctor who experimented on soon-to-be-executed prisoners. The cells were renamed club cells, due to their spherical shape. Reiter’s syndrome, a form of arthritis caused by a bacterial infection, was renamed “reactive arthritis” after it was found to be named after a doctor who conducted deadly typhus experiments on prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In most cases, the name change suited medicine’s growing preference for descriptive terms over honorifics. “Many of us don’t use eponyms because they’re anatomically uninformative,” says Jason Organ, an anatomist at Indiana University. Instead of a fallopian tube, he said, “uterine tube just makes more sense — it tells you what it is.” In some cases, the inconsistent use of eponyms can even lead to medical errorsadded dr. Organize.

Not all anatomists agree with this slash-and-burn approach. Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt, an anatomy educator at Harvard Medical School, trained in Germany a few years before the legacy of Nazi medicine came to light. Eponyms give her the opportunity to do that remind future doctors of the path of medicine may never go down again. “I wouldn’t necessarily see them as badges of honor, but as historical markers – as teaching moments,” she said.

In class, Dr. Hildebrandt Frey’s syndrome, one of the rare medical eponyms that celebrates both a female researcher and a victim of the Holocaust. The syndrome, a neurological condition that can cause heavy facial sweating while eating, is named after Lucja Frey-Gottesman, a Polish neurologist who was killed by the Nazis after being sent to the Lvov Ghetto.