Dear John
It's I think a purely a matter of convention to apostrophise first
describers of a medical condition. In analytical chemistry we usually use
the opposite but equally valid convention: the Jaffe reaction; the
Bolton-Hunter reagent (but I have heard people using 'Jaffe's reaction').
The origin may be based etymologically on the fact that in chemistry, the
author describes something he has invented, whereas in medicine the author
is usually describing a subject he has observed. Has anyone out there any
idea of when Bright's disease, or Bence-Jones's protein (altho' in my
chemical analogy this should perhaps be called 'the Bence-Jones protein')
was first described as such?
Best wishes
Gordon
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