In early 2000, after hearing rumors that Dr. Friedrich Wegener had ties to National Socialism, Dr. Matheson and his colleagues spent years researching World War II records around the world.They eventually found Dr. Wegener Nazi supporter He worked three blocks away from the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, and may have dissected victims of medical experiments.of 2011, several major medical institutions moved to replace Wegener’s syndrome with “granulomatosis with polyangiitis” (albeit a mouthful indeed). (“Wegeners” can still be found in ICD-11. )
The search for a Nazi name has begun. It turns out that Clara cells, a type of cell that lines the lungs and secretes mucus, was named after a Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on prisoners about to be executed. The cells were renamed club cells to reflect their bulbous shape. Reiter’s syndrome, a type of arthritis caused by bacterial infections, was renamed ‘reactive arthritis’ after the origin of its name was discovered. doctor who carried out lethal typhus experiments on prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
For the most part, this name change coincided with the growing trend in the medical community to favor descriptive terms over honorifics. “Most of us don’t use eponyms because they’re not anatomically beneficial,” says Indiana University anatomist Jason Ogan. “The uterine tube makes more sense and tells us what it is,” he said, rather than the fallopian tubes. In some cases, inconsistent use of eponyms results in medical erroradded Dr Organ.
Not all anatomists agree with this slash-and-burn approach. Dr. Sabine Hildebrand, an anatomy educator at Harvard Medical School, underwent training in Germany several years before the legacy of Nazi medicine came to light. For her, eponyms offer the following opportunities: remind future doctors The path of medicine must never decline again. “I like to see them not necessarily as badges of honor, but as historical landmarks. As an educational moment,” she said.
Dr. Hildebrand emphasizes in the classroom fly syndrome, one of the rare medical eponyms that honors both female researchers and Holocaust victims. The syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes profuse facial sweating while eating, was named after Lucha Frey Gottesmann, a Polish neurologist who was murdered by the Nazis after being sent to the Lvov ghetto.
