Cognitive Approaches to Specialist Languages

Chapter Twenty
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Eponymic terms

The low level of salience that eponymic terms are credited with is owed to
the difficulty of retracing the link between the name and the disease. In
medicine, one would probably need to memorize the professional history
of the physician or surgeon, or the case history of the patient, perpetuated
in the eponym to extend one’s knowledge of the underlying concept
beyond the definition.
As has been stated earlier, eponymic terms continue to stir controversy
among medical scientists. Recent discussions in medical journals have
addressed such questions as the perpetuation of names of Nazi-supporting
physicians in terminology and the choice of the Saxon genitive vs.
substantival adjunct (Hardinge’s approach vs. the Hardinge approach),
with preference given to the latter.
The conceptual content of eponymic terms is often complex. In
medicine, diagnostic tests and clinical signs that these tests are used to
produce are often represented by eponymic terms. Below we examine the
descriptions of two clinical diagnostic tests in orthopaedics:

Lasègue sign (straight leg raise): with the patient lying down on his or her

back on an examination table or exam floor, the examiner lifts the patient’s

leg while the knee is straight. If the patient experiences sciatic pain when

the straight leg is at an angle of between 30 and 70 degrees, then the test is

positive and a herniated disc is likely to be the cause of the pain.^2

Mackiewicz sign (femoral nerve stretch test): the patient lies prone, the

knee is passively flexed to the thigh and the hip is passively extended; the

test is positive if the patient experiences anterior thigh pain.^3

The concept constituents which are found in both these descriptions
include the initial position of the patient, part of body involved,
examiner’s action, criteria for interpreting the test as positive and negative,
and significance of the findings. Thus, the descriptions reveal complexity
of the underlying concepts, which are made up of a number of
constituents. The more analytical synonyms given in brackets capture only
two of these constituents each: straight leg raise indicates the position of
the limb and the action taken on it, while femoral nerve stretch test
indicates the internal structure that is affected during the test and how it is
affected.

(^2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_leg_raise
(^3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femoral_nerve_stretch_test