When medicine lacked diagnostic tools to investigate and definitively pinpoint the underlying causes of most diseases, assigning an eponym afforded physicians a concise label for a symptom cluster versus cataloguing the multiple systemic features that characterized a patient’s illness.
Most commonly, diseases are named for the person, usually a physician, but occasionally another health care professional, who first described the condition—typically by publishing an article in a respected medical journal.
Two eponymous disorders that follow none of the foregoing conventions are: Fregoli delusion, which derives its name from an actor whose character shifts mimicked the delusion it describes; and, Munchausen syndrome which derives from a literary allusion to Baron von Munchausen, whose personal habits were suggestive of the symptom cluster associated with it.
[3] Diseases named for animals with which they are associated, usually as a vector, are properly styled as zoonymic; cat scratch fever and monkeypox are examples.
In May 2015, the World Health Organization, in collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), released a statement on the Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases "with the aim to minimize unnecessary negative impact of disease names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.
"[4] These guidelines emerged in response to backlash against people and places, based on the vernacular names of infectious diseases such as Middle East respiratory syndrome, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
In 1975, the Canadian National Institutes of Health held a conference that discussed the naming of diseases and conditions.
[9] In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:[10] The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one's own terminology.