Medical Eponyms: False or True Friends?

No doubt, everybody is familiar with some medical expressions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Apgar test, Hashimoto’s disease or Hashimoto-thyreoiditis, Lisfranc fracture and Parkinson’s disease. These are eponyms i.e., terms based on proper names, mainly personal names of outstanding representants of a certain professional field and making their names memorable by denoting procedures, instruments, theories or other phenomena, such as diseases. Medical eponyms are in general not considered worthwhile as research topics by lay people. However, their importance is above all due to their numbers and the high frequency of their occurrence. It may be amazing for many people that, according to various sources, medical eponyms are estimated to range between 7,000 and 8,000. Due to their high frequency, their place and function in medical terminology has been the topic of a lively and never-ending discussion between the descriptive and pro-eponymist movements for decades. The descriptive camp argues against the use of medical eponyms by stating that they are often confusing and that they can be easily misunderstood, and additionally, they are not always fair regarding the achievements of the person chosen to name a phenomenon. What makes this research really topical, is the frequent use of eponymic terms in contexts of Medical English as Lingua Franca (MELF), gaining more and more importance worldwide. A related question is whether eponyms can have an impeding or a facilitating impact on intercultural communication in the usage of English by medical professionals and medicine students with different mother tongues and cultural backgrounds. 

Rita Brdar-Szabó and her co-author, Mario Brdar (University of Osijek, Department of English Linguistics) try to answer this question in their article published by English for Specific Purposes, a D1 journal according to SJR. The research focuses on the problem of medical eponyms behaving as false friends based on eponymic and alternative terms in 8 languages, in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian. The empirical study takes as its starting point a selection of 50 medical phenomena for which biologically descriptive terms, cognate eponyms considered as translational equivalents, or alternative eponyms, simple or compound ones, exist in these languages. The primary goals in this study are as follows: (i) to identify various types of false friends that may occur in the case of medical eponyms and (ii) to explain how such relationships come into existence. The secondary goal is to suggest how such eponymy-related language- and culture-specific problems may be dealt with appropriately. After introducing the notion of eponym and that of false (and true) friends, attention turns to their role in medical English. The explanation of the methodology and the sources of data leads to the main part of the article which offers a typology of medical eponyms according to interlingual criteria and the detailed analysis of the particular types, accompanied by 11 figures in colour. Based on the results of the corpus analysis, cases of true friends can be considered as the default type in cross-linguistic relation and in intercultural communication, but there are also some flagrant cases of false friends, as well as some less obvious cases of false-friendness. An overview of strategies that can be used in teaching medical terminology based on eponymy and its translation in order to avoid pitfalls of the types discussed below are given in the practice-oriented part of the article which applies the results of interlingual comparison. Finally, some strategies are put forward that can be used to alleviate the problems, to optimize the usage of eponyms in MELF contexts, to avoid pseudo-eponyms and to minimize the potential damage by confusion or misunderstanding.

To sum up, the study has shown that medical eponyms can sometimes function as false friends in intercultural communication, which may strengthen the position of the “anti-eponomyst” movement in medical terminology. Apart from this, based on the results of the research it should be also stressed that eponyms can figure as true interlingual friends, too, and additionally, they can have motivational potential.

The original article appeared here: When medical eponyms become false friends, and how to deal with them. In: English for Specific Purposes, Vol. 73, 2024, p. 75-94.

Only the abstract and section snippets are accessible online on Elseviere’s website.