second thoughts on Nkinis

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>But if you dislike the negated eponym, you're out of luck; it is standard
>medical terminology. See the American Cancer Society's page on it
>
>(http://www.cancer.org/docroot/cri/content/cri_2_4_1x_what_is_non_hodgkins_lymphoma_32.asp),
>
>and my instructions to the annotators who work for me in the project on
>information extraction from the biomedical literature for which I am
>research administrator
>
>(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mamandel/annotators/onco/definitions.html#malig-type;
>in the bulleted list, under "eponymy").

In recent years there seems to have been some effort to remove these
possessive endings entirely: e.g.:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/style_guide_p2_3.htm

... where the CDC stipulates:

<<

Diseases or syndromes named after a person or place are generally not
possessive:

Bright disease
Chagas disease
Down syndrome
Hodgkin disease
Kaposi sarcoma
Kawasaki syndrome
Lyme disease
Marfan syndrome
Minimata disease
Reye syndrome
Rocky Mountain spotted fever

 >>

It seems to me that the change has been quite perceptible in the last 20
years or so (I think "Hodgkin disease" was a rare expression much earlier),
but I think the initiative has been resisted quite strongly. I suppose
probably some journals insist on the non-possessive usages, but I think
"Hodgkin's disease" still outnumbers "Hodgkin disease" in the leading
medical journals, at my very brief glance. Perhaps Mark Mandel or another
of the scholars knows much more about this.

-- Doug Wilson