Correspondence:

We read with interest Van Tassel et al.’s “Eponymous women in ophthalmology: syndromes with prominent eye manifestations named after female physicians” [1]. The study of medical eponyms unearths many interesting stories: some are interesting trivia (did Adolf von Baeyer really name barbiturates for a Bavarian barmaid called Barbara? [2]), others are profoundly upsetting (Hans Eppinger’s investigation of concentration camp prisoners’ life expectancy with only salt water to drink [3]). The description of gender imbalance among medical eponyms is certainly a worthy addition to the field.

In their opening paragraph Van Tassel et al. repeat the common assertion that there has been a “decline in eponym use”. In 2016, we described the rise and fall of 8636 extant and extinct medical eponyms in PubMed’s database of around 25 million articles spanning two centuries [4]. In Fig. 1 we present a new subset analysis of the use of 291 ophthalmic eponyms. The findings are consistent with those of the broader dataset. Eponyms are today used in the titles of more PubMed indexed entries than at any time in the past, and the annual growth remains rapid. Accounting for the inexorably increasing number of publications per year, we find a modest decrease in the prevalence of eponyms since their peak in the 1990s (to the levels seen around 1980). We find evidence to suggest that this decreasing prevalence can in part be accounted for by an increasing non-clinical presence on PubMed (by comparing eponym use to clinical words like “artery”). There was also evidence in our original study [4] (by comparison to a historical index of eponyms), that studies like ours are likely to underestimate eponym coinage—newly coined eponyms are not yet present in lists of common medical eponyms. Interestingly, we also found that coinage of well-established eponyms was brisk at the time that articles mourning their loss were originally being written [5].

Fig. 1
figure 1

Top—the number of uses of 291 ophthalmic eponyms in the title of PubMed indexed documents per year since 1900. Middle—the proportion of PubMed indexed documents using one of 291 ophthalmic eponyms in their title since 1900. Bottom—the ratio of PubMed indexed documents using one of 291 ophthalmic eponyms in their title to those using one of 50 common clinical terms since 1900

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In summary, there is no convincing evidence that medical or ophthalmic eponyms are in precipitous decline. Perpetuating the idea that they are could become self-fulfilling, discouraging new eponym coinage. This will do nothing to create a more even gender balance among medical eponyms.