“James Parkinson did not die of his own personal disease ... he died of a stroke” Eponyms: Possessive or Nonpossessive?

Eponyms are terms or phrases that associate the name of a person (or sometimes persons) with a structure, disease, syndrome, stain or other technique or method, space, sign, location such as a city or country (technically a toponym, see Anderson, 1996) or any of a number of other things. There are literally hundreds of eponyms that are commonly used in many different fields (for medicine see Firkin & Whitworth, 1987; Dorlands, 2000; Stedmans, 2000: for neurology see Koehler et al., 2000). This column will not argue for, or against, their use, but will consider the ongoing question of whether they are best expressed as possessive or nonpossessive. Naturally, we will focus on the nervous system.