Disease Naming Quotes

They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

Every hope of successive generations of scholars that order might be constructed from the chaotic mess of medical nomenclature has been frustrated. Even diseases recognized in the same historical period have been given names based on characteristics that have no relation to one another, and thus no common criteria.

One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague. One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) He has St. Vitus's dance, He has nerve fever, He has dropsy, He has ague, since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.

I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.