ABSTRACT
Some years ago, we devoted a column to possessive/nonpossessive eponyms in neuroscience (Haines & Olry, 2003). The world of eponyms, of course, provides an inexhaustible supply of linguistic material for historians to scrutinize (Anonymous, 1986; Cooper, 1983; Burchell, 1985; Endtz, 1989; Dervaud, 1990; Olry, 1995). Let’s give two typical examples. Firstly, Ganser’s commissure, described in 1882 by Dresden neuropsychiatrist Sigbert Joseph Maria Ganser (1882). This commissure actually was discovered by Franz Schnopfhagen five years earlier (Schnopfhagen, 1877), and “par suite d’une confusion regrettable” (“by an unfortunate mistake”; Dejerine, 1901) L. O. Darkschewitsch and G. I. Pribytkov called it Forel’s commissure in 1891. Secondly, Bronislaw Onuf-Onufrowicz (1899) coined the term “Nucleus X” to refer to a parasympathetic subpopulation of sacral spinal cord neurons at the very end of the nineteenth century. His name was kept in anatomical literature but only in the form of “Onuf’s nucleus X” (Paturet, 1964).
